Great Britain is beset by uncertainty. The world stage is in flux: US hegemony is no longer assured; power is tilting from the West towards Asia and a multilateral world order is slowly materialising. The United Kingdom now sails these uncertain strategic waters on a leaky ship. Cut adrift from the European Union, it is uncertain whether the UK can patch up relations with its neighbours on the continent. In the wider world, no longer anchored to the EU, the UK may flourish as a more independent actor, but risks fading into obscurity should it not find appropriate ways to project its influence. At home lies the spectre of dissolution. Scotland is again flirting with independence and tempers have flared in Northern Ireland over trade barriers resulting from Brexit. To confront such uncertain times, the British government has articulated a new grand strategy: Global Britain.

Global Britain emerged in the aftermath of the Brexit vote largely as a rhetorical device used by Conservatives and Brexiteers to paint a positive picture of post-Brexit Britain. Under Boris Johnson’s government, the concept has expanded to resemble something approaching a much-needed grand strategy. The Integrated Review, published on 16 March this year, pushed Global Britain to the forefront of the country’s foreign policy approach. In the foreword, Johnson writes: ‘We will be open to the world, free to tread our own path, blessed with a global network of friends and partners, and with the opportunity to forge new and deeper relationships’. Johnson aims for Global Britain then, to position the country as a crucial internationalist node on the world stage. Perhaps more importantly, the government is hoping that this new direction will put an end to the UK’s strategic identity crisis.



^ Boris Johnson speaks with British troops stationed in Estonia in 2019 (Source: Reuters).

The UK has been here before. In 1962, Dean Acheson, a former US secretary of state, remarked to an audience gathered at Westpoint Military Academy that, ‘Great Britain has lost an empire but not yet found a role’. Acheson’s words ruffled feathers in Westminster to be sure, but he had a solid point; the UK then, and to some extent now, has never quite reconciled the reality of its present position with its past as a global superpower. As the British Empire crumbled, once-self-assured policymakers in Westminster were confronted by uncomfortable questions about the UK’s place in the world.

Decades later, another American, this time the renowned scholar and former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski called Britain a ‘retired geostrategic player.’ This assessment may well ring true as the UK no longer has the weight of its empire to unilaterally shift the global balance of power. However, it does still possess the means to project itself as a ‘top tier middle power influencer’. London can use a combination of its economic weight, soft power appeal and military means to project its influence on the world stage and make Global Britain a more tangible reality. Fail to do this however, and the country may fade into irrelevance; the UK may become a small fish swimming anxiously through a big pond that is dominated by a rising China, a less confident US, and an uncertain EU.

To understand Global Britain, it is important to consider the grand strategies which proceeded it, namely offshore balancing, and the Transatlantic Bridge. Strategy is a rational endeavour; states strive to adopt the means and ways most appropriate for achieving their ends. However, a state’s strategic preferences can also be heavily influenced by its culture and history. For this latter reason, Global Britain should not be assessed in a vacuum but within the wider context of British strategic history.

^ The Palace of Westminster, home to the UK's Houses of Parliament

Offshore Balancing and the End of Empire

Great Britain’s strategic posture was largely a product of its geopolitical position as an island nation and later its vast maritime empire. From around the late-17^th century to the end of the Second World War, Britain’s primary security interests were twofold: the defence of the ‘home islands’ (the British Isles) and the protection of the empire. Great Britain’s position as an island nation granted it an enviable degree of separation from the European mainland and the tug of war for continental dominance continually played out between the European powers. 

With the English Channel acting as its defensive moat, Britain was mostly able to rely on a combination of maritime supremacy secured by the Royal Navy and buck passing to continental allies to protect its interests. Throughout most of the Pax Britannica – the height of British imperial power – between 1815 and 1914, Britain remained on the side-lines of European affairs, preferring instead to expand its empire and grow wealthier from trade and industrial innovation. 

Britain’s grand strategy, coined splendid isolation by Lord Salisbury and more commonly understood as offshore balancing today, did occasionally require significant military interventions on the European mainland. Great Britain was anxious to ensure that a hegemon did not rise to dominate the continent. As such, in the early 19^th century Britain committed land forces to thwart French ambitions during the Napoleonic Wars, and again in the mid-century to prevent the rise of a dominant Russia during the Crimean War. Britain’s interests were best served by a relatively peaceful multipolar regional order in Europe, as a shift to a unipolar order there could threaten Britain’s naval supremacy, trade, and imperial possessions.

^ The defence of Hougoumont by British forces at Waterloo, 1815 (Source: National Army Museum)

Great Britain fought twice more in the early 20^th century to preserve a favourable balance of power in Europe. The Allied victory over the Central Powers in the First World War prevented German primacy in Europe but the conflict proved costly for Britain, which had spent over 25% of its GDP on the war effort between 1915 and 1918. Moreover, the march of free trade and globalisation which had powered the British economy during the 19^th century had ground to a halt and was supplanted by increasingly protectionist economics in the post-war years. Nevertheless, the British Empire survived the First World War.

The Second World War effectively landed the death blows to the British Empire. In the 1930s, Britain was confronted with three revisionist powers: Nazi Germany which posed a threat on the continent and in the Atlantic, Fascist Italy in the Mediterranean, and Japan in the Far East. Britain again emerged on the victorious side, but its capacity to sustain the empire was broken. London, which had previously been the world’s creditor, now owed more than $40 billion in debt. Across the empire, nationalist sentiments were stirring, and Britain’s imperial possessions gradually gained their independence, so that by the late 1960s, Britain had lost most of her colonies.

Although the end of empire necessitated a shift away from offshore balancing, the strategic preferences which defined it have remained a part of the British psyche. Namely, the UK envisions itself more as an international actor than a regional European one and perceives that its interests are better served in the wider world than they are closer to home in continental Europe. In many ways, Brexit reflects a historical indifference and at times suspicion towards the European mainland. The UK’s aversion to the EU’s ‘ever closer union’ partially stems from a long-held desire to preserve British sovereignty from an encroaching European superpower, real or imagined. Similarly, the name Global Britain itself, is evocative of the country’s past as a global maritime trading nation. Although the UK cannot revive the level of international influence it possessed as the preeminent imperial superpower of the 19^th century, one of the key objectives of the Global Britain strategy is for the UK to have an active presence in every major world region.

^ The aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, the new symbol of British maritime power? (Source: forces.net).

The Transatlantic Bridge

Empires rarely die suddenly, and it was not until the Suez Crisis in 1956 that British imperial decline had become fully apparent. Nevertheless, some British policy makers had woken up to the reality that a new world order had emerged from the ashes of the Second World War and that the UK would have to adjust accordingly. In 1948, Winston Churchill, then Leader of the Opposition, proposed that the UK position itself at the heart of what he called, ‘three great circles’. These three circles consisted of the British Commonwealth and Empire, the English-speaking world (the US, Canada, etc.), and a united Europe. 

The Three Circles strategy sought to position the UK as a crucial pivot between the major centres of Western power. However, in the first decades after the Second World War, the UK lacked sufficient rapport or influence over any one of the circles to make the strategy work. The British Empire progressively unravelled as its constituent parts gained independence and the Commonwealth’s members were too politically disparate and disinterested to form a significant geostrategic unit of power. The so-called ‘special relationship’ between the UK and US generally endured, but the Americans - now in their ascendency - viewed the British as junior partners. To make matters worse, the relationship almost entirely unravelled during the Suez Crisis in 1956. Meanwhile, the UK’s attempts to establish an important position in Europe were continually frustrated. French President Charles de Gaulle twice vetoed the UK’s membership application to the European Economic Community (EEC), first in 1961 and again in 1969.

^ Members of the UK's 3rd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment, guarding a water filtration plant near Suez, December 1951. Events at Suez in 1956 would starkly illustrate Great Britain's imperial decline. (Source: National Army Museum).

The UK may have failed to successfully position itself at the heart of a tripartite Western world, but similar ideas continued to influence British strategy. Policymakers in Westminster were forced to abandon pretences that the Empire had endured and looked to position the UK between the remaining American and European circles.  By acting as the Transatlantic Bridge between these two major poles of Western power, British policymakers reasoned that they could project British influence in both poles without having to sacrifice too much autonomy to either. The UK’s admittance to the EEC in 1973 and continued strategic alignment with the US, which largely resumed after 1956, meant that the UK was now better placed to play its preferred role as quasi-transatlantic pivot power.

The Transatlantic Bridge strategy was not formal doctrine per se, but the imperative to uniquely position the UK between the US and Europe remained the driving force behind British foreign policy throughout the latter half of the 20^th and early 21^st centuries until Brexit. For example, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s speech at the European Research Institute in 2001 encapsulates the logic behind the Transatlantic Bridge Strategy. Blair proclaimed to the audience: ‘Indeed the UK has a powerful role to play as a bridge between the US and Europe – we are economically influential in both… We want to be fully engaged in a united Europe, working with an internationalist USA.’ 

Even before Brexit, the Transatlantic Bridge could sometimes appear to have been built upon shaky foundations. De Gaulle had in part vetoed British applications for EEC membership because he feared that the British would act as a proxy for American influence. European apprehensions that the UK was closer to the US than to Europe continued well after the country was admitted into the EEC and EU. Growing Euroscepticism in the Conservative Party in the late 1980s onwards and the UK’s decision to join the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq contrary to Germany and France’s opposition, did little to calm European concerns. Nevertheless, the UK was valuable to the European bloc in terms of its economic contribution, military power, and diplomatic pull. The 2013 vote in the British Parliament against a decision to join US-led airstrikes in Syria also calmed some apprehensions in Brussels that London would always follow Washington’s lead on foreign policy.

The foundations of the Transatlantic Bridge did eventually collapse. The Brexit vote in 2016 followed by the formal British withdrawal in 2020 has quite starkly worsened the relationship between the UK and the EU. Without EU membership, the UK will struggle to maintain its position as the bridge between Brussels and Washington. Of course, Brexit does not alter the fact that the British Isles are a mere 42km from the European mainland, and so the EU will remain a crucially important partner to the UK. By virtue of geography, the UK’s security is intimately tied to what happens in Europe, particularly regarding mass migration, terrorism, and a belligerent Russia. Likewise, the Anglo-American relationship’s importance will endure because the strength of Western hegemony is so dependent on US foreign policy. The end of empire for the British was largely tolerable because the American-led order aligned with enough of the UK’s interests to make its geostrategic retirement a comfortable one. Therefore, the UK’s relationships with the US and EU will continue to drive much of its foreign policy, but it can no longer play at being a bridge between the two.

^ Without EU membership, the Transatlantic Bridge strategy is no longer a feasible approach to British foreign policy ( Source: European Commission)

Where the Past Meets the Future

In practical terms Global Britain as a strategy must define exactly what the UK’s interests are and then identify the means and ways to achieve them. This is no easy task, but at least it is a tangible one. Economic wellbeing, diplomatic influence, and ultimately survival are ends that all states are bound to pursue, and the UK is no different in this regard. The harder task shall be to reconcile Great Britain’s past with its present. Acheson’s comment that, ‘Great Britain has lost an empire but not yet found a role’, still rings true today. The UK is a curious country, for it lies in the north-eastern arm of the Atlantic Ocean, on the fringes of Northern Europe, but its heart still resides in the ships which left its shores to explore the world in the age of sail. The strategic culture of the British necessitates that they remain at large on the world stage, however diminished their power may be. The greatest challenge the Global Britain strategy faces therefore, is whether it can deliver the role to which the British aspire to play within the limitations of the ways and means available to them.