British Grand Strategy
Over the course of the lives of most people reading this, Britain has been a disappointing presence on the European and World stage. The first major international action Britain took on the world stage that many of us will have been aware of was the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Like a lot of people my age, my early memories of politics were of the 2008 Financial Crash and its aftermath. While the gruff-sounding Gordon Brown was the first Prime Minister I could remember, the first election I can remember brought in the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition. Since then, it’s been a rollercoaster of referendums, corruption, incompetence, and spineless policies aimed at winning the next election instead of the next decade.
As a Brit, it’s a shame. We’re the country that invented the train, yet our Prime Minister decided to announce the cancellation of HS2 in a railway-station-turned-conference-centre in Manchester. We’re the country that advanced medicine and scientific innovation to new heights yet failed to competently deal with a pandemic. Atrophy, however, is a result of negligence rather than some sort of foreordained comeuppance.
Britain’s problems come from a lack of strategic vision. What the UK needs is to create and rediscover a grand strategy. Historically, our grand strategy has been intrinsically tied to empire, yet this does not need to be the case today for the UK to succeed.
What is Grand Strategy?
Mike Tyson famously said that “Everyone has a plan ‘till they get punched in the mouth”. The difference between a plan and a strategy, then, is that strategy is made to deal with getting punched in the mouth. In other words, strategy deals with competitive and shifting environments. There’s a reason why Prussian military writer Carl von Clausewitz argued against calling war a science, or an art. This was because war – being an extension of politics – could not be precisely replicated, nor did it deal with the inanimate. It’s why his most famous work is called On War, instead of the eternally popular Art of War.
Today, ‘strategy’ is used to mean anything from self-development to finances to business to public relations to politics. In a broad sense, strategy is about aligning limited means to potentially unlimited aspiration. If strategy is to really be strategy instead of a plan, however, this has to take place in a competitive environment. More simply, it’s about figuring out what you want specifically, using what you have at hand to get there, and securing yourself against any competition in the meantime.
Historically, however, the word ‘strategy’ was confined to the world of politics. Dealing with other political actors in the pursuit of your interests meant getting your hands dirty: strategy was the deployment of force to achieve political ends. This tradition is important because it shapes the conversation on Grand Strategy. To take strategy from being mundane to Grand originally meant shaking off a sense of proportionality; it meant throwing every means available to achieve the end in mind. The obvious examples of this are the World Wars: the nations of Europe invested every man, woman, and at times children to win an impossibly large conflict. Scale, then, is the determining factor of grandness even if the scales are weighed in bloodshed.
More recently, writers like John Lewis Gaddis have put forward a different view. Grand strategy, he argues, is strategy made grand by the scale of its timeframe and ambition. Instead of policy that thinks five or ten years ahead, grand strategy thinks in terms of decades and centuries. The Cold War is the epitome of this. Despite changes in leading political parties, the demographics of those parties (with Kennedy and Nixon being responsible for the Democrats and Republicans as we know them today), new technologies, rising powers and a host of other significant variables, the US remained committed to defeating the USSR. However, as Gaddis and others point out, grand strategy understood in this way does not require an enemy. Britain, in its quest for empire, sustained a grand strategy for centuries.
British Grand Strategy
In figuring out how to align means to aspirations over the course of several centuries, a country has to take real consideration of what it aspires to. Yet, our aspirations are intrinsically linked to how we see ourselves. Grand strategy, therefore, is a project that pursues more than just material success but also a meaningful ontology and identity. For this reason, it is worth peering at British history.
In a Scottish university like St Andrews, this first point may not go down well. Modern British history, and with it, British grand strategy, starts in England. Specifically, Tudor England. Up until this point, England had strong links with the European continent. When Henry VIII took to the throne, England still owned Calais and maintained its claim on the French crown. England was so committed to the dominant socio-cultural backdrop of Western Europe – Catholicism – that the Pope bestowed the English monarchy with a title that it still uses today and that can be found on coins: Fidei Defensor - Defender of the Faith.
Over the course of the Tudor dynasty, however, England lost its footholds on the European continent and divorced itself from the papacy in favour of its own religion. These events aligned themselves with the development of the printing press and the subsequent proliferation of vernacular texts. The effect of this period cannot be understated. England – the hegemon of the British Isles – was left as an island in both geographical reality and political circumstance.
At this moment in history, the major point of insecurity was the threat of a united coalition against England. It is why Henry VIII was convinced to marry Anne of Cleves despite reservations and while this fell through due to disagreements between the major continental powers – the French kings and the Hapsburgs – the threat would later materialise in the form of the Spanish Armada. Over the course of the Tudor dynasty, England realised that in order to stay safe, it had to play a new game.
· It had to keep Europe divided to prevent invasion or exclusion (see the Armada and later, Napoleon’s Continental Blockade).
· It needed a navy to fend off threats both to its trade and its physical security.
· It needed to be more innovative and creative to stay ahead of the game.
· Finally, it needed a political structure that could support the expenses of a navy and handle the disruptive tendencies of innovation.
The desire to keep Europe divided would culminate into a formal policy of balancing the powers. This usually meant siding against France but, as Germany found its footing in the European game, this changed to meaning throwing its imperial might alongside France to curb Germany’s expansion.
Henry VIII had taken some steps in creating a stronger navy, but it was his daughters: Queens Mary and Elizabeth, as well as the later Stuarts, that would really transform naval capacity. Britain’s navy would come to dominate the world, and alongside the need for trade and innovation, this transformed into a series of colonial links from Gibraltar to Egypt to Oman to India. Yet, the innovative spirit would find purchase in the realms of science and industry too as Britain established itself as an island of inventors that created the steam engine, trains, the spinning-jenny, and even the bicycle.
All of this supported, and was facilitated by, a political structure that incorporated those with the education and accumulated resources to set things in motion – the Lords – and those with the collective labour and inspiration to do truly great things – the Commons. At the top of this system was the sovereign, who provided the traditional legitimacy and unpartisan perspective that helped prevent the system from devolving too far into factionalism. And it was from this vantage that Britain took itself from a rainy, muddy island in the North Atlantic to establishing itself on every continent – for better or for worse – for centuries.
What Next?
1956 proved to be a pivotal year for Britain. Despite being the victor of two world wars, it was rapidly losing control of its former colonies. The order of the day was liberalism and communism, not imperialism. The old lion was weary and struggling to keep up with the demands of a rapidly changing era. The costs of war had bled the country dry, and, in the post-war years, the decision had been made to relinquish influence in order to acquire American loans which would permit the establishment of the NHS and the broader welfare state. Yet, there remained a sense that this was the heart of the Empire and the Commonwealth, diminished as it may be. That was until 1956.
Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had made the call to nationalise the Suez Canal – a jugular of international trade, as the recent Houthi attacks show – thus putting the security of British and French access to the wider world at risk. In defiance of American leadership, the two European states allied with Israel and launched a military invasion of Suez. To simplify things, the alliance failed to appreciate international opposition to the attack so when they faced pressure from the US, the USSR, and the UN, they were forced to withdraw. The French came out of the period and realised that the US was not a steadfast ally to European interests so decided to embark on a strategy of developing independent capacity for action within a broader framework of leadership and cooperation in Europe.
Britain, by contrast, had realised that the US was now the major player and decided to develop a ‘special relationship’. In the decades since, Britain has vacillated from seeing itself as an international partner to the US’ interests, to being a fellow European state. Its parameters for engaging with the world assertively became muddied and unclear. Maintaining what remained became easier than innovating in a changing world. Yet, as I mentioned before, grand strategy is more than just material security. It is about aspirations, and aspirations are about identity. Maintenance became prolonging, prolonging became a weak attempt at slowing atrophy. Despite efforts from leaders like Thatcher and Blair, the UK has not hit upon a new grand strategy that captures its sense of self and its aspirations in any meaningful way.
It would be too ambitious for this article to lay out some visionary future that allows Britain to get itself back on its feet, act in a meaningful way in the world, and sustain that for decades or centuries to come. Yet, there are two lessons from Britain’s history. The first is that how we act internationally informs how we see ourselves domestically. The second is that as much as that remains true, foreign policy is built at home.
If the UK wants to have a chance at finding its footing again, it needs to clean up its act domestically. That means fixing the issues that prevent people from feeling like stakeholders in their own country: housing, political accountability, meaningful work. It means making our tax-system fairer so that ambition is encouraged but greed is not. It also means taking antiquated institutions such as the House of Lords and reworking them so that they provide the same benefit while not feeling like archaic hangovers from an older period. It means making our political system more collaborative so that people don’t think in terms of Labour vs Conservatives but as fellow citizens negotiating and grappling with solutions together. It means taking the left-wing instinct of reform and change and applying it to the right-wing instinct of continuation so that we create a country worth conserving. It means voting in ways that encourages politicians to think in decades instead of election cycles. It means starting our own initiatives instead of just posting infographics on Instagram or waving a sign occasionally so that people feel empowered and part of something greater. This is the home of the Mother of Parliaments and it is about time we started seeing it that way.
British grand strategy is grand not just because of the scale of time that it deals with, but also the scale of ambition. It’s grand because it relies on the structures of state and the institutions of power, but it also relies on its citizens to create movements, and websites, and unions, and civically minded organisations. It’s grand because it leaves Britain feeling like it might actually be worthy of the title Great.
Image courtesy of Alexander Nasmyth via JeniKirbyHistory, ©1816. Some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
