Strategic Posture Review: United Kingdom

Successive British governments have stressed strategic continuity, and there appears to be general political support for this among the electorate. But over the past 10 years, and particularly over the past two years, the U.K. has struggled to find the resources necessary to maintain the capabilities that would ensure strategic continuity. It has also found itself forced to reassess its position on a number of key international issues that determine how other powers respond to the U.K. as a global power. As a result, the United Kingdom’s position in the current international system is generally ambiguous.

When the Conservative-Liberal coalition government of Prime Minister David Cameron took office in May 2010, it immediately made clear that there would be “no strategic shrinkage” in the U.K.’s global engagement or, indeed, in its tangible presence around the world. The analysis of the incoming government mirrored that of its Labor predecessors under Gordon Brown and Tony Blair in arguing that the U.K. had inherently global interests and must therefore promote them by being a global strategic player. With just 1 percent of the world’s population, the U.K. nonetheless accounts for 4.4 percent of world trade and is the seventh-largest economy. It ranks in first place among OECD members, jointly with the United States, for inward investment, and invests some $50 billion of its own overseas. Around 5.5 million Britons, or 8 percent of U.K. citizens, live abroad, while the ethnic minority population of the U.K. is almost 5 million. The U.K. has traditionally had one of the top-five widest networks of diplomatic representation in the world, and, through the BBC, it possesses a respected information service that, until recently, was unique in global communications. ...