At a conference on the road to Brexit in 2017—with Europeans still adjusting to the shock of dealing with a former partner that many thought had gone rogue—the Danish finance minister Kristian Jensen observed: “There are two kinds of European nations. There are small nations and there are countries that have not yet realised they are small nations.” If the aim was to ruffle British feathers, he succeeded. The UK ambassador to Denmark at the time, Dominic Schroeder, rose to the bait. He saw no indications, he insisted, “of a diminished or diminishing power”.
Few outside the UK seemed to share his confidence. Two years later, in 2019, during the exchange of politesse about possible mutual learning at a UK-China colloquium, a Canadian delegate suggested wryly that Canada could help the UK learn how to be a small country. Two years after that, Rishi Sunak, attending the G20 in Bali as prime minister, suffered a public lesson on what being a small country might entail when the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, unceremoniously cancelled a meeting with him, just minutes before it was due to begin.
It would have been the first face-to-face bilateral between the Chinese leader and a British prime minister in almost five years. The meeting was not rescheduled.
Perhaps it is worth noting, given that the promise of a large trade deal with China featured in the Brexit fantasy opportunities, that Sunak left office without having exchanged so much as a phone call with the Chinese president. He was the first UK prime minister in recent times who, despite serving longer than 45 days, was not in contact with the leader of the world’s second-largest economy during his term of office.
As the election victory celebrations fade, the new government faces the cold reality that it must establish a fresh footing in the world for a country that has shrunk dramatically in international importance since the promising Labour dawn of 1997. As David Lammy, the new foreign secretary, pointed out in a recent article, that year the UK economy was bigger than that of China and India combined, and the UK played an important role in the world’s biggest trading bloc; the world was still essentially unipolar, and the US, the UK’s closest ally, was unchallenged as the biggest military power on the planet. Almost none of that landscape remains.
One of several truths that Brexiteers refused to acknowledge was that the US-UK relationship rested heavily on the UK’s membership of the EU and the influence that it was able to exert there. Washington found that useful. Today, if the US wants to influence the EU, it will probably call Germany.
The UK ‘took back control’ only to find that its borders were more porous than ever
As an eminent British émigré, now resident in Washington, explained in a recent meeting, “It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which the UK slipped off the radar with Brexit. We have a fantastic ambassador in the US, but the UK no longer matters and is barely mentioned.”
The UK “took back control” only to find that its borders were more porous than ever and the range of issues actually under its control beyond those porous borders had contracted. No longer an economic powerhouse, the UK is not the driving influence anywhere, and for many in the capital of its biggest ally, it has begun to look needy and confused.
The new foreign secretary must try to restore some credibility to UK Inc. He will have little time to catch his breath. On 9th July, there began an important Nato summit in Washington. Hanging over it, inevitably, was the possibility that Donald Trump, if elected in November, will withdraw from the alliance as he has threatened to do, forcing Europe to stand up to Russia without US money or materiel.
A few days later, on 18th July, it will be the UK’s turn to play host to some 50 political leaders who will meet at Blenheim Palace for the European Political Community summit. It will be an opportunity for the new government to make friends, but it will also have to face the challenge of shoring up European support for Ukraine against the possibility of a collapse in US commitment and despite a surge of support across Europe for a medley of Putin-friendly politicians on the far right.
First impressions count, and the new government will be judged by its conduct in these critical meetings. A key task for the foreign secretary, and one that he seems ready to embrace, is to signal that he has understood the damage that recent administrations have inflicted on Britain’s economy and international standing, and to kill off the neo-imperial imaginings of the Brexit cheerleaders once and for all.
He may find that the return of realism and sobriety to the UK in an uncertain world is welcomed with relief, not only by the British electorate, but also by other middle powers and potential partners. If the UK adopts a sober tone and succeeds in restoring some dignity and responsibility to its battered reputation, it could find a welcome among its peers and a role to play in the world.
Who are its peers? Despite the Danish and Canadian teasing, the UK is not yet a small country. It should seek its fellows among those medium powers that share interests and values: countries such as Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey that, like the UK, are having to cope with the fallout from conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as with China’s growing strategic challenge, migration, the climate emergency and the fragmentation of democracy at home and abroad.
Understanding the limitations of post-Brexit Britain’s capacity to act effectively—and not to overpromise—is an essential starting point. If the UK cannot revisit EU membership, it can, at least, ditch the inflated fantasy of bestriding the globe like a post-regulatory buccaneer, thriving in glorious freedom from European constraints. That illusion floated on a set of assumptions, some of which were always false. Others may have started out as plausible but have been overtaken by events.
One explicitly false promise was that the UK would swiftly strike important free trade agreements (FTAs) with the US and China, despite the possibility—already evident in 2016—that these two superpowers were entering a fierce contest for influence that would increasingly oblige lesser powers to make difficult choices between them. It was further premised on the idea that globalisation and the western rules-based order would continue much as before, and that the UK could cherry-pick its benefits through FTAs and compensate for any losses incurred by Brexit.
That was always vanishingly improbable. In 2016, the UK exported more to Belgium than to India, Brazil, Russia and South Africa combined, and no plausible increase in trade with the rest of the world could readily compensate for the loss of the EU single market. In fact, most of the FTAs the UK has struck merely replicate those it already enjoyed in the EU, and the three that were touted as Brexit triumphs—the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and those with Australia and New Zealand—will contribute respectively less than 0.07 per cent of GDP by 2040, according to the last government’s own calculations, and 0.08 per cent and 0.03 per cent to GDP by 2035.
The FTA with the US, the UK’s second-biggest trade partner after the EU, has failed to materialise and is unlikely to. Nor is there any possibility today of the promised FTA with China, and although one with India is possible, it would require increased access to the UK for Indian citizens, not something the last government found easy to embrace.
So instead of these imagined benefits, the UK is now battered by the effects of superpower competition, supply chain vulnerabilities and the mounting global mistrust that is reshaping globalisation in favour of protectionist policies. This is shrinking the opportunities for countries that find themselves outside robust established trading arrangements and without the deep pockets that would allow them to compete with US and Chinese industrial subsidies. Since much of what the UK needs to do to halt decline and to build a new role in the world will require investment, achieving a more functionally useful relationship with Brussels should be a priority.
Brexit was also premised on a security map that had remained roughly stable since 1989 but is now in tatters. In its place is war in Europe, uncertainty over the US commitment to Nato and other alliances and an increasingly assertive China that is seeking to rewrite the global rules in its favour, in concert with Russia, North Korea and Iran. Security is the next headache the UK must tackle.
In 1990, the UK boasted an army 153,000 strong. Today, against an increasingly dangerous backdrop, the army has only around 77,000 permanent personnel. The Royal Navy is so diminished that an operation such as that launched to recover the Falkland Islands in 1982—when the navy was four times its current size—would no longer be possible. Britain has also lost the industrial capacity that it would need to maintain a prolonged military effort or, for that matter, the native digital capacity to sustain advanced cyber-warfare. Its nuclear deterrent needs a very expensive upgrade and is entirely dependent on the US.
The US was once Britain’s key security asset. Now the UK is dependent on an unpredictable and troubled US that sees the relationship as less and less useful. It risks being obliged to serve US foreign policy interests, even where they do not coincide with its own. Britain’s long-term future, and its security, will depend on making and retaining allies.
The UK is not yet a small country, but it is a diminishing middle power adrift in a dangerous world. Preventing further shrinking, stabilising damaged relationships and leveraging its remaining assets should be the new government’s priorities.
It is important to be clear about what those assets are, and what they are not. Britain is still one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, but the Security Council is likely to be paralysed for the foreseeable future. As for wider UN influence, the UK’s command of votes in the General Assembly is weak, as evidenced by the abstentions of India, Pakistan and South Africa—all Commonwealth countries—from the vote to condemn Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Despite British sentiments, their historical ties to Russia and to Putin’s current best friend, China, mattered more to them than King and Commonwealth.
Britain does have important legacy assets, although all have suffered under the outgoing government: the UK has formidable soft power that it must learn to value, including a strong educational offer, powerful cultural and creative industries, the BBC (which operates in 42 languages) and a science and technology capability that continues to innovate. These are important foreign currency earners and contribute to Britain’s reputation in the world, as well as being critical to competitiveness and to the production of an educated workforce. They also support social mobility and help to address serious security dilemmas. It is time UK governments stopped paying lip service to these assets and gave them due importance and support.
The UK also has a financial sector that remains a global player, despite the negative impacts of Brexit, a diplomatic service that is sadly diminished but still potentially effective, and a defence sector that, though smaller than before, still stands comparison with our peers. Britain remains a leading member of Nato and a key player in several security arrangements, such as Five Eyes and the Joint Expeditionary Force. Before Sunak undermined it, the UK also had a leading position in global climate diplomacy, buttressed by sound domestic policy. It is not too late to restore that credibility and with it the business confidence that recent policy reversals have undermined.
Provided it learns to stop bragging, the UK could have a truly useful role to play
Recent experience in our fast changing world has reminded us that there are developments which profoundly affect the UK but that no country alone can control: the spread of new pathogens for example, or the waterlogging of British fields through climate change and the wider threats to global food security; the rapid development of AI and our vulnerability to cyberattack; the fact that big powers will write rules and create technical standards to suit themselves, riding roughshod, where they can, over the interests of small and middle powers.
If the UK is to defend its interests and weather the storms to come, it must make new friends among other middle powers. Many are equally anxious, and will be open to cooperation, provided it is approached in a spirit of parity. They share the need to protect their interests from the worst effects of big power competition, and they, like the UK, need functioning international rules to defend themselves. In a multipolar world, where the US and China will seek to cancel out each other’s initiatives, alliances of middle powers will be critical to getting things done. Provided it learns to stop bragging, the UK could have a truly useful role to play.
In addition to the immediate security threats in Ukraine and the Middle East, the UK—like the rest of the world—is faced with rapidly accelerating climate impacts. These will continue to deliver destabilising shocks that will demand concerted and collaborative efforts to build resilience in everything from global financial systems, disaster response and food and water security. The escalating heat crisis will provoke population movements that will severely test the resilience of liberal democracies, and the UK will need to work with partners both to mitigate climate impacts and avoid further political destabilisation.
There is also an opportunity to build back influence in conflict-afflicted regions of sub-Saharan Africa, wounded by the reduction in the aid budget and the abolition of the Department for International Development. If the UK could restore its reputation for supporting development, conflict prevention and conflict resolution, it could also help to counter the negative influence of Russia and China.
This change of government offers a real set of opportunities: to mend fences with Europe, rebuild trust in the wider world, to advance climate policy and support a Plan B for a scenario in which Trump may soon call the shots. It starts from where we are, not where we would prefer to be. Approached in that spirit, the UK might still avoid having to learn the painful lesson of how to be a small country.
