Global Britain is under new leadership; what is in store for its future? Liz Truss brings to her new government an extreme hawkishness and a highly ideological world view.
She claims to stand for a ‘strong and outward-reaching Global Britain’ with proposals to boost defense spending from 2 to 3 percent of gross domestic product by 2030 to back this. She has vowed ‘to push Russia out of the whole of Ukraine’; and has called for NATO to no longer be constrained to Euro-Atlantic security alone but to ‘go global’ to tackle worldwide threats.
Towards the end of her leadership campaign, she started to talk up the need to revisit last year’s Integrated Security and Defence Review so as to upgrade its focus on combating the ‘growing malign influence’ of China. Under Boris Johnson, this review, which outlines British priorities in diplomacy and defense over the coming decade, identified China for the first time as a ‘systemic competitor’; Truss now wants to elevate this designation to ‘acute threat’ on a par with Russia.
Serving as International Trade Secretary before becoming Foreign Secretary a year ago, Truss has had more experience of world affairs that most of her predecessors. In these posts she has advanced the UK’s ‘Indo-Pacific tilt’ promoting military and military industrial links with the region, and indeed it was she who signed the AUKUS pact to supply Australia with the technology to build nuclear submarines aimed at containing China.
Truss views China as a threat to the ‘rules-based international order’. Her vision sees a greater role for the ‘rules makers’ themselves, the G7, which she calls on to act as an ‘economic NATO’. Fully embracing Joe Biden’s ’democracies versus autocracies’ agenda, she has called for Britain to build a ‘network of liberty’, boosting collaboration with ‘like-minded nations’ to build a bulwark against China’s rise.
Following Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan and China’s military response with exercises conducted around the island Truss summoned the Chinese ambassador to explain his country’s ‘increasingly aggressive behaviour’. For Truss, as representative of a serial war-fighter, to lecture a government that has not fought a war in over 40 years really takes the biscuit.
China has consistently expressed a preference to achieve reunification with Taiwan by peaceful means but has not ruled out resort to the use of force. This would target ‘foreign forces conspiring to interfere’. As the Financial Times was to report, experts considered that, rather than a rehearsal for war, China’s military exercises were a deterrence operation, a ‘hint to the US that this is how we will sink your carriers.’
Of course, anti-war activists stand for dialogue and diplomacy so that the two sides of the Taiwan Strait can work out a peaceful future relationship; at the same time it is important to heed the warning by the Quincy Institute of ‘threat inflation’ – the hyper-exaggeration of China’s military capabilities habitually used to back the large scale increases in US military spending.
Despite Truss’s success in the Tory leadership contest, the ‘ideology first’ versus ‘trade first’ factions in the Tory Party will continue to battle it out – whether she survives remains to be seen.
Truss enlisted the ‘anti-China hawks’ to her campaign and now Tom Tugendaht, from the cross-Party China Research Group, has been rewarded as Minister for Security under the Home Office, with a fat slice of the ‘defence’ budget earmarked for intelligence and cybersecurity. Meanwhile, Ian Duncan-Smith of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China is angling for Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.
Whether Truss actually pursues full scale confrontation with China or not, it is certain she will tilt further towards the Indo-Pacific, supporting the expansion of AUKUS, so stoking regional tensions further. The UK will also deepen military ties with Japan and promote its growing links with NATO. Never having fully faced up to its ultranationalist and colonial militarist past, Japan has recently agreed a massive armaments programme which is forecast to make it the world’s third largest military power.
NATO, the armed guard of the G7’s ‘rules-based order’, is using the ‘China threat’ to prolong the war in Ukraine – our defence secretary, Ben Wallace, for one refusing compromise since ‘China is watching’. An increasingly intense hostility towards China has been allowed to build up, weighing on the Chinese community in Britain.
A tidal wave of negative headline about all things Chinese only helps to obscure the fallacy of British democracy itself and its waning credibility, particularly in the Global South.
It was John Major, the former Tory prime minister, who, when Johnson first launched the Global Britain project, pointed out that the UK was no longer a ‘great power’. He warned that ‘complacency’ and ‘nostalgia’ are the routes to a national decline. This applies all the more to Truss as she hunkers down for a ‘battle of civilisations’ with her particularly dangerous mixture of chauvinism and naivety.
US-China relations are at a point of crisis. Biden is stepping up arms sales to Taiwan accompanied by repeated promises that the US will come to the island’s defence, trampling over the existing framework of US-China agreements. Truss is on record as calling for NATO to also commit to the defence of Taiwan. Her delusions about Global Britain could walk us into deep trouble.
The more pressure from below that can be brought to bear to force Truss to relieve the cost-of-living crisis the better – it will mean less time and money for extending Global Britain’s military reach.
StWC must continue to expose the hypocrisies of the Western alliance; continue to oppose AUKUS, calling for an end to collaboration in militarisation in East Asia; and continue to demand that British forces keep well out of the Pacific. We cannot allow Truss to march us into a US-led war with China, a war, with consequences which would far outweigh the current problems of the Ukraine crisis.