Global Britain’s new geopolitical strategy is starting to work

“Up yours, Delors!” It’s déjà-vu all over again, as Britain relives its finest EU/France-baiting moment by joining the AUKUS pact, in the process helping to relieve France of £72.8bn that would have accrued to it for building diesel-powered submarines for the Australian navy. President Emmanuel Macron is distraught. Not since Napoleon Bonaparte chewed the carpet in the Tuileries after hearing about the latest activities of General Arthur Wellesley in the Iberian Peninsula has a French head of state indulged in such a temper tantrum.

In fact, the entire body of énarques, which in recent times has replaced the more aesthetically pleasing old noblesse in furnishing France’s privileged orders, is bouleversé. Echoing the claim of an earlier generation of paranoid European politicians, Jean-Yves Le Drian, French foreign minister, denounced the cancellation of the submarine contract as “a stab in the back”. France’s Europe minister, Clément Beaune, said that the resultant lack of confidence in Britain by the EU would delay a deal over the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Macron turned to Ursula von der Leyen for support, extracting from her a statement that “One of our member states has been treated in a way that is not acceptable.” This cry-baby, run-to-mummy behaviour by Macron is hardly the demeanour of a Jupiterian leader. Nor was his petulant evasion of a telephone call from Joe Biden. Macron is in full-scale hissy-fit mode, exhibiting all the vulnerability that should be unthinkable in a national leader. Where a chief minister of the Ancien Régime – a Richelieu, a Mazarin or a Choiseul – would urbanely have disguised the damage resulting from a failed policy with a well-turned epigram, Macron behaved like a distraught loser: from Jupiter to King Lear within an hour.

Yet the significant feature of the emergence of AUKUS is that it has very little to do with Macron. Only a politician with a personality so massively narcissistic could imagine that it did. The rage of Macron and his cronies at the cancellation of France’s submarine contract is, for Britons, a hugely entertaining bonus, but merely the icing on a more important cake.

It is, however, a very enjoyable spectacle. Remember all the tricks and snares that were laid for Britain by Michel Barnier, to the appreciative sniggering of his colleagues? The tendrils of EU power embedded in Brexit arrangements to subvert the UK; the attempt to destroy the City; the aggression against our fisheries; the funnelling of migrants towards the Channel and the English coast; the attempted imposition of European law by a man who now, as a presidential candidate, demands French emancipation from European courts and a moratorium on immigration into France?

Oh dear, bleat ci-devant Remainers, we have damaged relations with our valuable ally, France. We have simply done what France has always done: consulted our own interests. There may, somewhere in the world, be a bunch of geopolitical operators more cynical and chauvinist than those housed at the Quai d’Orsay, but they do not readily identify themselves. The French military cooperates with the UK’s armed forces; that is well and good, founded on mutual interest. If the French become less cooperative, they will damage their own defence policy.

The reality is that, apart from a lost commercial interest, France is largely irrelevant to AUKUS. Emmanuel Macron will try to ignore that reality, but the real cause of his chagrin is not chiefly the lost contract, it is the nightmare spectacle of a sovereign United Kingdom operating exactly as it did before its accession to the EEC in 1973. France saw British membership of the EU as a useful means of containing a rival of whom it had always been jealous. Now, Britain has fled the coop and gone free-range in global geopolitics.

In that sense, although Australia and the US are the leading partners in the nuclear submarine deal, the AUKUS pact represents a seismic moment in British geopolitical strategy. The threat from China was the trigger for the sense of urgency that inspired AUKUS and that threat will necessarily permeate UK foreign and defence policy. So, in which directions should Britain project its influence?

First of all, before any other consideration, Britain must rediscover its identity as a nation; that self-recognition will inform its geopolitical posture. Throughout the lifetimes of everyone in Britain today, an insistent voice has attempted to drum into our ears a message of defeat, of retreat, of insignificance. We must not succumb to imperial nostalgia. We must never imagine we could achieve anything on our own – hence the necessity of EU membership. We must not have illusions about being a great power, we must accept our role as an insignificant country dependent on its neighbours. Our historical trajectory could only be downwards. British governance was about managing decline.

This is rubbish. Britain is the fifth largest economy in the world, a nuclear power with a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council and with widespread cultural links around the globe, as the legacy of an empire that did infinitely less harm than good. Nations are largely taken at their own assessment, so it is time we recovered the national pride and confidence that not so long ago made us the greatest power on earth. We should aim, unapologetically, at becoming more powerful – commercially, militarily and culturally – for the basic reason that if we do not, a less benign power may outstrip us. Indeed, at least notionally we should aim at superpower status, especially since America is seriously faltering in that role.

However, if we are to achieve anything, we must stabilise the domestic situation. If Britain is hit by a winter power crisis, Macron et Cie. will laugh like drains. The government has failed lamentably in its duty to secure energy resources, with pathetically inadequate storage facilities and reliance on “European” gas – for which we would go to the back of the queue – that is actually Russian gas. Our energy supply is at the mercy of Russia and China, negating the purposes of AUKUS. The government must abandon seat-of-its-pants, essay-crisis management and make far-sighted provision for all eventualities.

Britain will project its influence primarily through “soft” power; but that only carries weight if backed by hard power. Britain must build up its defences to a meaningful, rather than token, degree. There are only 76,000 full-time trained soldiers in the British Army and a reduction is planned by 2025. That is ridiculous. For all the talk of cyber warfare, special forces and aircraft carriers, there will always be unexpected calls for boots on the ground, and 76,000 pairs of boots is blatantly inadequate. Of course we were right to build new carriers; but in warfare increasingly dominated by drones and cyber attacks, a carrier seen as a formidable projection of power could become a British Belgrano within minutes. That is the sobering reality.

The defence budget must be radically increased. It is time the defence of the realm was taken away from the Treasury. Claims of inadequate resources ring hollow when Boris’s self-indulgent train set, HS2, is swallowing £100bn and rising. We need an all-round defence capability and that will cost a lot of money; no state expenditure could be more legitimate.

Our geopolitical interests will move away from Europe and, while a close alliance with America remains necessary and desirable, the instability of recent American foreign policy suggests a long spoon. AUKUS is an indication of our increasing interest in the Indo-Pacific region. Last December Dominic Raab (Alas, poor Yorick!) met with his opposite number in India, resulting in an invitation to the Prime Minister to visit New Delhi. The trip was aborted due to Covid, but India offers prospects for a fruitful strategic partnership with commercial benefits too. India is concerned about China, with whom it has a disputed border, and its client Pakistan, allied with the Taliban through the pervasive influence of its rogue intelligence agency.

Japan is pivotal to the geopolitical situation in the Pacific. There is an ideal opportunity for Global Britain to forge a close alliance with Japan, which is trade-friendly and eager, in security terms, to join Five Eyes. That intelligence collaboration, involving the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, has become more active recently, due to the pandemic, but also clearly in response to Chinese sabre-rattling.

The geopolitical scene is undergoing reconfiguration at the moment, as nations reluctantly acknowledge the emerging reality of a new Cold War with China. America, too, is in a state of flux, experiencing an isolationist spasm. Isolation is Americans’ intuitive default position: but the responsibilities inseparable from superpower status exert a magnetic force in the opposite direction.

Global Britain potentially has a major role to play in the tectonic shifts among what a former prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas Home, memorably termed “great constellations of power”. In that context, Emmanuel Macron’s childish attempts to regulate British sausages entering Northern Ireland and the EU’s toy-town border down the Irish Sea betray the pathetic preoccupations of those who play at Realpolitik without possessing real power or gravitas. It is time for European politicians to grow up and scrap the ridiculous Northern Ireland Protocol. If they do not, we must tear it up ourselves.