New global reality demands hard-headed British response

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A decade ago Britain's foreign relations rested on two load-bearing relationships: membership of the EU and a special association with the US. The British electorate decided to dispense with the former, and we are watching the latter, along with our wider international assumptions, being vaporised in front of our eyes. Maybe normal service will eventually be resumed, but that would be a brave and foolhardy assumption, and it will certainly not happen anytime soon. The road ahead seems more likely to become increasingly treacherous.

That should alarm us, because the stakes are so high. Britain, alongside other mature democracies, has grown complacent about its security and decadent about defending its values. We now need our leaders to understand the scale of this new peril and respond with corresponding decisiveness and verve.

The relationship with the United States remains the most important show in town. It is Britain's biggest security protector, intelligence collaborator and trading partner. All of these planks of our national well-being should be championed and defended with relentless focus and seriousness. We should avoid theatrical displays of distancing from the US administration: playing to a domestic gallery instead is juvenile politics when the circumstances are so consequential. Britain's new Ambassador to Washington is a seasoned and skilful operator, and we need him to be successful. We must also demonstrate our indispensable value to the United States, not as an adjunct to them, but as an independent and dependable force for good. Of course it is nothing like a partnership of equals, but nor is it insignificant.

Britain should also work closely with other European nations on common security objectives. That does not mean re-litigating Brexit: shared strategic resolve does not require political union. Britain must demonstrate constructive impulses and political maturity, and the rest of Europe also needs to be clear-headed about its interests. Britain is the EU's second most important external partner after the US, not a supplicant. On defence and intelligence, Britain is a European leader, and we should act, and be treated, accordingly.

Meanwhile, Britain needs to extend its global networks, but with an unsentimental and strategic mindset. Feel-good, soft-focus diplomacy can serve a purpose, but our greatest adversaries do not indulge in it for a reason. They are hard-headed and pragmatic, always alert to their national interest, and the dangers are too great now for us not to match them.

That means going even further to find new synergies with our most dependable allies. It means valuing friendly clubs such as the Commonwealth but not deluding ourselves that all its members are equally friendly. It means being honest about the reality of groupings like the BRICs: an explicitly anti-Western organisation, albeit partially moderated by Brazil and India.

Britain needs greater imagination too. Latin America is a continent of democracies, with free speech, the rule of law and an attachment to human rights. Its countries are courted endlessly by China, while being bizarrely neglected by the US, and largely ignored by Britain. It is mystifying that we seem so indifferent to the potential of these partnerships.

Britain’s greater ambition will require us to raise our game, both psychologically and with enhanced capacity. So let us be clear-minded and confront some difficult truths. Here are three. 2.3% of GDP is not a big enough defence budget to frighten aggressors or fully reassure allies. Borrowing over £13 billion extra every year to give that money away (sometimes intelligently; sometimes wastefully) sits very uncomfortably with an under-resourced military. And our foreign diplomacy is being done on the cheap: too few people, junior staff making up shortfalls, senior employees underpaid. A Corinthian appeal to civic obligation, underpinned by the Honours system, is not a substitute for a well-resourced, ruthlessly pragmatic and focused, elite-level foreign service.

Britain and other big Western democracies have been coasting for too long. Our exposed security predicament now requires extra money, and spending freely instead to keep afloat an unrealistic social contract is not sustainable. JD Vance's Munich speech was spectacularly bad-mannered and, with his unwillingness to confront the realities of Russian barbarism, curiously negligent. But we would be foolish to just huff-and-puff and ignore it. Partly because, although the picture he painted of a bloated and compromised European political culture was cartoonish and simplistic, it contained elements worth contemplating. And partly because we cannot now say that we have not been explicitly warned. We need to learn to stand solidly on our own feet. And fast.

Jeremy Browne is the CEO of Canning House and a former British Foreign Office Minister of State.