Britain and its strength without the European Union

On February 3, 2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who had just concluded the United Kingdom's triumphant exit from the European Union and won a landslide victory in the general election, chose the historic setting of the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich to set up his vision for the new country and its future role in the world community.

Johnson's vision of a global Britain meant little to the EU. Having finally pulled off the geopolitical miracle of Brexit and freed itself from the whole abyss of obligations to the EU, it made sense for the UK to go into the world the same way and independently. For political observers in the UK and beyond, Johnson's determination to ensure a fully independent British foreign policy was an integral part of his successful domestic policy strategy. For the Johnson government, Brexit became more of an ideology than a political event.

The UK may have left the EU, but it cannot leave Europe. Geographically, it is clear that the EU remains an important partner for the UK. In a world of increasing geopolitical competition, foreign advances, and geoeconomic coercion, a medium-sized democracy off the west coast of Eurasia can only hope to promote its interests alongside like-minded liberal partners. As the United States becomes increasingly self-centered and focuses on the Indo-Pacific and China, the EU is a necessary geopolitical partner for the UK.

The UK can contribute to this partnership. Unlike its “special relationship” with the U.S., the UK does not need to assume the role of junior partner and follow its leader along the path of whatever foolish ventures may dictate U.S. domestic policy. However, it is necessary to move beyond the current quarrels, stop the reckless juggling of the fragile peace in Northern Ireland and strive to create a cooperative relationship.

There is a way to achieve this geostrategic alignment without sacrificing any of the sovereignty benefits that Brexit could bring. The current British government does not seem to want to take this approach. But it remains a very viable political strategy in the UK. As a recent European Council on Foreign Relations poll shows, the British public is, at best, indifferent to the restoration of Britain as a world military power and has little animosity toward the EU after Brexit.

Global Britain is an illusion rooted in a misguided imperial past. But the UK does not need to isolate itself from the world or assume a permanent subservient position in world affairs. The UK, interacting with the EU, has the potential and the political will.

Johnson seems to be generally indifferent to Britain's extreme geopolitical vulnerability.

It may seem that Britain's new global role will require increased diplomatic resources to restore all those historic relationships that have been neglected for too long. But while Britain's network of defence advisers is growing by a third, the Foreign Service has made do with the personnel it has. “Doing business” will become more complex than ever, given the need to do two-way business in the capitals of the 27 EU member states.

Johnson's predecessor, Theresa May, proposed something very different: a UK-EU security and foreign partnership “unprecedented in its breadth, involving diplomacy, defence and security and development cooperation”. But in the eyes of the Europhobes who brought Johnson to power, this will only reinforce the EU's view that a post-Brexit Britain should remain in the orbit of the EU. True sovereignty required an entirely new cosmology: global Britain must free itself completely from the gravitational field of the Union and restore its position as one of the brightest stars in a wider sky.

As already mentioned, such a worldview seems bizarre and dangerous. It would be misleading to believe that there are huge untapped trade opportunities on the other side of the world that could compensate for the loss of the EU's single market. And it is dangerous to turn a Nelsonian gaze on what the UK can achieve in terms of global influence through cooperation with the EU.

British foreign policy for the geopolitical era

If the worldview underlying global Britain is indeed an illusion, post-Brexit Britain needs a foreign policy that reflects its new status outside the EU. The first step is to figure out what the country wants and needs from its foreign policy and what kind of foreign policy the British public can support.

To this end, the European Council on Foreign Relations commissioned Datapraxis to survey the British public. Not surprisingly, the overall conclusion of the survey is that the public has little interest in foreign policy and that the public is fairly evenly divided on the most sensitive issues. “I don't know” is the main answer to most questions. Almost half of the respondents (46 percent) expressed no opinion about the massive promotion of the Integrated Survey in the Indo-Pacific region. This indifference gives the political leadership ample opportunity to determine foreign policy, as the Johnson government has amply demonstrated. However, in this rather liberal environment, some public preferences and even demands for British foreign policy are visible. First, the British public as a whole is fighting for independence and sovereignty. Britain's decision to leave the EU has a complex origin, but apparently the main motive was a desire to let Britain decide for itself, as part of what Johnson proudly proclaimed “sovereignty restored”. In this matter, the government seems to be following the spirit of the emerging nationalist era. Many U.K. citizens see the countries most often cited as key interlocutors for the U.K., including the United States, France, Germany, and India, as “essential partners” rather than allies who share its values. From a public perspective, the UK does not seem to have many relationships with either country (with the one exception of Australia: Anzacs, Bondi Beach, and cricket are even more important than the country's recent role as a leading climate pest nation).

Beyond the rigidity of EU membership, the UK has assumed a web of international commitments, in part because British politicians saw the net benefit of limiting Britain's freedom as the price to pay for limiting the freedom of others. Therefore, Britain has sought to change the world around it to better suit its national interests, in essence, helping the country remain master of its own destiny.

The public's lack of enthusiasm for the United States seems to extend to its conflict with China. 55 percent of respondents believe there is already a “cold war” between the United States and China. Moreover, 45% believe that “containment” of China is necessary, but among them only 39% believe that the UK should be involved in this. 46%-and the majority of those with an opinion on this issue-would prefer to remain neutral in the event of a war between the United States and China. Once again, UK citizens hold the same views as their EU counterparts.

However, cooperation is compatible with the public demand for sovereignty and independence if the UK can maintain a diversity of partners and avoid excessive dependence on any one partner. In international affairs, monogamy is the enemy of sovereignty. Indeed, to the extent that Britain has had a “grand strategy” over the past half century, it has been precisely to avoid having to choose between America and Europe. Finding a balance between the U.S. and the EU is therefore critical to any effective U.K. strategy. It may be easier for the current British government to work with Washington. However, on issues ranging from climate change to the rise of China, simple geography dictates that the UK's interests and priorities require closer cooperation with the EU than with the US. Aligning too closely with any of them means losing the ability to make decisions on our own, which is why, as Brexit supporters claim, it has been fought so hard.

In practice, this will mean that the UK will have to triangulate between the U.S. and the EU on a range of issues. Triangulation does not mean the need to act as a bridge or mediator. The U.S. and EU do not need or want Britain to, in the words of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, “build bridges of understanding between the U.S. and Europe” (the U.S. and EU have always been able to communicate with each other on their own-such as Biden's meeting with European leaders in June 2021, which resulted in a comprehensive list of cases between the U.S. and EU). Rather, triangulation means using various forms of influence on both partners to bring them closer to the UK position. Climate change and technology regulation are examples of how this can work across a wide range of U.K. foreign policy challenges.

Climate change and carbon tariffs

The EU, the United States, and the United Kingdom have different approaches to addressing climate change. The EU focuses on controlling high-emitting sectors, establishing a climate change tax, and efforts to export climate regulation to its trading partners. The United States, in contrast, has focused on technological solutions, in part because it lacks the domestic consensus to set a price on carbon emissions. The United Kingdom is somewhere in the middle.

On climate issues, the EU's carbon pricing system is the biggest point of contention between the EU and the United States and between the United Kingdom and the United States. It is unclear whether the United States will adopt the type of carbon-boundary adjustment mechanism (CBAM) proposed by the EU that has raised eyebrows in Washington, and if so, it is unclear how. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry recently warned that the EU should use the levy only as a last resort, saying, “It has serious implications for the economy, relations and trade”.

From the UK perspective, this potential divergence is an opportunity. The particular strength of CBAM is that it is one of the few international mechanisms proposed to help achieve the climate goals set at COP26, which otherwise remain dependent on nearly 200 countries meeting their individual commitments and performing their tasks efficiently. So CBAM may well be important to how history will judge the summit and the UK's first major post-Brexit intervention on the world stage. But the EU has little chance of achieving it without the active cooperation of the United States. At the same time, the EU-US agreement on CBAM could hurt the UK, which has relatively important iron, steel and aluminium exports to the EU.

How has everything changed since Brexit and how is the UK doing? Great, according to the government. The carefully planned G7 summit in Cornwall in June 2021 demonstrated the restoration of the UK's international leadership. It was also an opportunity to announce a new free trade agreement with Australia-and this is just the latest of more than 60 such agreements already concluded by the UK since Brexit around the world.

But the reality is admittedly less encouraging. Almost all of the “new” free trade agreements are simply extensions of EU agreements that the UK has benefited from as an EU member. True, there is still no agreement between the EU and Australia (although one is inevitable). But the UK deal with Australia is a small thing, estimated to add only 0.01% to 0.02% to GDP. One should not forget September 2021, when London, Washington and Canberra created their alliance - AUKUS, firmly pushing France to the fringes of politics in the Indo-Pacific region.

Perhaps more promising is the start of negotiations for the UK to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Transpacific Partnership (CPTPP), formerly known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. This group includes many of the dynamic Indo-Pacific economies. However, the additional benefits of CPTPP membership are unlikely to be substantial, given that the UK already has bilateral free trade agreements with the four most significant partnership countries (Japan, South Korea, Canada and Singapore), again a legacy of EU membership. The government's own figures put the potential increase in GDP at less than one-tenth percent.

By comparison, a government economic forecaster estimates the damage to GDP from Brexit at 4 percent, double that of the pandemic. Total trade in goods between the UK and the EU fell by 15 percent, or £17 billion.

More recently, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson surprised the public in a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky when he proposed a political, economic, and military alliance that would be an alternative to the European Union. It should include countries “united by distrust of Brussels, as well as Germany's reaction to Russian military aggression”. These are Britain, Ukraine, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; later, Turkey could join the association, which is very reminiscent of the forgotten but exhumed Intermarium project.

Continuity of trade agreement between Colombia and the United Kingdom of Great Britain

The UK also has no plans to leave the South American region. Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, together with the UK, signed a document that will maintain the framework of trade relations. It should be noted that the signing of the document occurred when the UK was still in the process of leaving the EU.

The goal was to ensure that the existing conditions of integration and preferential access to this important market are maintained.

“Both countries share the objective of ensuring the continuity of the relationship we have in the agreement between the European Union and Colombia, Peru and Ecuador since it came into force in 2013”, explained Minister of Trade, Industry and Tourism, José Manuel Restrepo Abondano.

It is important that Colombia continues to maintain and expand its current relationship with the United Kingdom, mainly in the area of trade in goods and services, investment, and government procurement. This is a market that in 2019 accounted for 10.2 percent of what goes to the European Union and 7.4 percent of what is imported in exports.

One of the sectors that benefits most from the trade relations currently managed by both economies is agriculture. In 2020, domestic exporters sold these goods to this country worth $309 million, accounting for 66 percent of total sales in this country and 14.3 percent of agricultural exports in the entire European Union. The main export products were bananas, coffee, flowers and fruits, and other edible plant parts.

According to Foreign Office documents published by Declassified, the U.K. Embassy spent £6,000 in 2019-2020 to conduct an “analysis of perceptions of U.K. soft power in Colombia” that helped “identify future interests for the association in public messaging and social media”. Surveys of Colombians were conducted “which helped the embassy develop the most effective approach”.

After the survey data was released, Colin Martin-Reynolds, British ambassador to Colombia from 2019, committed £25,000 to the creation of a new “environment and biodiversity awareness campaign”. British investors appear to be a priority in the new UKCOL2021 program. At its launch in June, Colombian Deputy Foreign Minister Francisco Echeverri described the UK as Colombia's “historic ally” and “our third most important investor”.

At the same event, Flavia Santoro, president of ProColombia, the state agency for the promotion of foreign investment, said that UKCOL2021 was a “milestone” in relations between the two countries, adding that “we have set goals to expand business with UK investment”.

Going back to the analysis of the Global Britain project, after all, this is rather an illusion. But there is a foreign policy that can win the support of the British public and chart a secure and influential future for the UK. The real question is whether the British people can find and elect a government strong enough to make it happen. Plans for a referendum in Scotland in 2023 show that there are different views on Britain's future.

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Translation by Costantino Ceoldo