Johnson’s imperial bombast could suck Britain into more deadly interventions
Relations between the world’s great powers are tenser than ever since the cold war. Troops are massing along Russia’s border with Ukraine. Chinese ships and planes are openly threatening Taiwan. Japan is rearming in response. Turkey is renewing its belligerence towards its neighbours. Russia is backing east-west fragmentation in Bosnia.
Where Britain stands in all this is dangerously unclear, drifting on a sea of Boris Johnson’s gestures and platitudes. The Royal Navy currently has a £3.2bn aircraft carrier waving the union flag in the South China Sea, completely unprotected. China could sink it in an hour. In the Black Sea, a British destroyer provocatively invades Russian waters off Crimea, showing off to the world’s media. Last week, the British foreign secretary, Liz Truss, advanced her bid for her party’s leadership by sitting astride a tank in Estonia and warning Russia that Britain “stood firm” against its “malign activity” in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Britain’s outgoing defence chief, Sir Nick Carter, estimates that the risk of accidental war with Russia is now “the highest in decades”.
There is no evidence of a coherent strategy in these moves. Johnson is travelling a familiar path, seeking foreign glory to distract from domestic woes. He has announced a reversal of Britain’s 1960s withdrawal from “east of Suez”. He seeks something called an “Indo-Pacific tilt”, and a projection of what he calls “British leadership in the world”. His March defence review proposed a 40% increase in Britain’s nuclear stockpile, in flagrant defiance of the 1968 nuclear non-proliferation treaty. To push home the point, he appointed the navy’s expansionist Admiral Tony Radakin as his new chief of defence staff, reportedly against military advice.
What this has to do with Britain’s defence is obscure. None of it falls within any treaty obligation. London has no obligation to get involved in China’s argument with Taiwan, nor does Taiwan even want it. Yet when Theresa May last month asked Johnson if his anti-Chinese Aukus treaty with Australia and America committed Britain to military action, Johnson played macho and refused to answer.
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