© REUTERS/Thomas Peter

One year into the presidency of Donald Trump, international affairs are in flux—not in the perennial sense that “a lot is going on across the world,” but in the more fundamental sense that things are changing structurally with an unknown outcome.

Trump has accelerated a central, structural change in international affairs that was already happening prior to his arrival in the White House: a noticeable decline in the United States’ political desire as well as capacity to lead on the international stage. Under its most recent four presidents, the US has gone from declaring itself indispensable to international diplomacy, to regretting its period of unilateral hubris, to trying to lead from behind, to not leading at all.

Today, Trump’s determination to take the US out of the leadership game is forcing America’s allies and opponents to adjust and challenging them to take greater responsibility for their future security as well as prosperity. The world is at the beginning of an uneasy new normal, where leaders across the world are driven to adopt more proactive foreign policies in order to compensate for the loss of US leadership.

The Receding Tide of US Leadership

Many people’s worst fears of a Trump presidency have not come to pass. US troops remain forward-deployed in Eastern Europe, and US-Russia relations are frozen in an uneasy stand-off of mutual suspicion. The president has appointed national security cabinet members who understand the value of NATO, and he has grudgingly committed his administration to uphold Article 5 of the Atlantic Alliance. He has re-engaged with traditional allies in the Middle East. He has not imposed the swingeing unilateral trade measures against China that he promised during his campaign.

Even in those areas where the president has taken radical steps–on climate change, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran’s nuclear program, or Jerusalem – his dramatic public announcements disguise a near-term continuity and leave room for maneuvering. His choice of method for withdrawing the US from the Paris agreement on climate change extends US adherence to the end of his presidential term. His “non-certification” of the Iran deal transfers responsibility for deciding whether to abandon the agreement to an already overloaded US Congress. His statement recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and embassy move will not occur for another three years–also around the end of his first presidential term.

On the other hand, these ambiguities cannot disguise the fact that the Trump administration has accelerated the shift from the US being a committed, if imperfect world leader to being a more explicitly self-interested superpower. His mantra of “America First” is a declaration that the US will relinquish its core role of leading the world by example.

The Trump administration’s approach to regulation (or de-regulation), whether on the environment, financial supervision or corporate transparency in developing countries, appears designed to create market advantage for US firms versus their international competitors. This has meant the US relinquishing its role as the driver of a new wave of international liberalization of trade and investment–specifically through the Obama administration’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. They would have generated a common rise in standards on issues such as public procurement, intellectual property protection, labor standards and internet governance across two of the largest regional marketplaces in the world.

Similarly, Trump has removed the US from its role as a promoter of better domestic governance and democracy. His most successful visits have been with authoritarian leaders who offer the best opportunities to secure economic benefit for the US. Trump’s references in his first speech to the UN General Assembly in September about the primacy of strong sovereign nations with different values and different dreams being able to “coexist … on the basis of mutual respect” could easily have been delivered by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Trump supporters would counter that his administration is now simply playing the same hard ball as everyone else, and that far from all Americans benefited from the liberal, open market approach of his predecessors. This may be true, but under his leadership, America is returning to the role it played in the mid-1930s, when its beggar-thy-neighbor domestic policies contributed to the rise of authoritarian governments around the world—and ultimately to a second world war.

Ripple Effects

History may rhyme, but it rarely repeats itself, as the saying goes. So how are other countries reacting to the return of a brutally realist outlook in the White House? There are three groups to consider.

First, this has been an especially difficult year for US allies in Europe who see themselves as America’s traditional partners in upholding the liberal international order. Some European leaders, most notably German Chancellor Angela Merkel and, to a certain extent, French President Emmanuel Macron, have sought to pick up the baton of liberal leadership. A majority, including the British, are trying to look beyond the personality of the occupant of the White House and focus on sustaining the many other channels of transatlantic cooperation, including with the US Congress. Some European leaders, mostly but not all in political opposition, even welcome Trump’s ascendancy.

Wherever one stands on this spectrum, it is possible to argue that Trump has had a positive effect on Europe. Concerns over the US becoming a security insurance policy of last resort and Britain’s imminent withdrawal from the EU have forced serious steps towards higher defense spending and deeper EU defense integration. Europeans are also being drawn into a more serious debate about Iran’s destabilizing effects across the Middle East, rather than just focusing on the importance of protecting the JCPOA and hoping for the best after the plan’s expiry. They are ramping up their security relationships and presence in the Sahel, a region that matters greatly to Europe and less to the US. And the EU has completed its Economic Partnership Agreement with Japan and is seeking a mandate to begin free trade negotiations with Australia and New Zealand.

These initiatives will continue to face obstacles and expose the distinct priorities and sometimes divergent interests of EU member states. Many would prefer simply to turn inwards and focus on fixing themselves after the trials and tribulations of the European financial crisis. The White House’s nationalist discourse, actively promoted across Europe by its ideological champions and financial backers among the “alt-right” movement, could exacerbate those differences. But there is no doubt that Trump is having a catalyzing effect on efforts to create a more autonomous Europe in international affairs.

Stepping In: China and Russia

A second group to consider are America’s main challengers for leadership around the world: most prominently China and Russia. In many ways, they are the main beneficiaries at this stage of America’s withdrawal from global leadership.

President Xi has been quick to step into the leadership vacuum, from his pro-globalization speech a year ago in Davos to hosting a major international conference last May on the Belt and Road Initiative. With US domestic politics in turmoil following Trump’s election, and the same in Britain following the Brexit decision, China’s soft power among its neighbors and the wider world is rising by default. The Chinese are looking for ways to exploit their new-found influence, whether in UN bodies or on international debates such as over regulating the internet.

In the absence of a US strategy for the Middle East, Vladimir Putin has doubled down on his military intervention in Syria and is now deepening relations with Egypt and Saudi Arabia. He can also stir up European popular discontent in order to weaken the EU with no fear of US retaliation. And he takes every opportunity to demonstrate equivalence between Russia’s amorally self-interested approach to international affairs and that of the United States under Trump.

At the same time, however, America’s more selective engagement in regional conflicts will lessen the options for low-cost Russian interference. The case of Syria shows that if Russia wants to play a more active role in the Middle East, it will have to bear the financial, security, and reputational costs itself. The same can be said for China’s growing military presence in the South China Sea and its broader neighborhood. If China is now seen as Asia’s regional hegemon, this will create opportunities for the US to play the role of counter-weight, much as China has done while the US has been in the dominant position.

An Inevitable Adjustment

The third group of countries are those that lack the protection of a strong regional institution and that still depend individually on the United States for their security. They include countries that are part of the broader democratic “West,” like Japan and South Korea, as well as some non-democratic countries now experimenting with more representative forms of governance and more inclusive models of economic growth, like Saudi Arabia. They are the most vulnerable in this more barren international landscape, where US protection from dangerous neighbors is increasingly conditional as well as unpredictable.

Like the Europeans, these US allies are being forced to build up their defense capabilities and rely more on their own diplomatic agility, including by triangulating their foreign policy beyond the US to the world’s other major powers. This is a less safe geopolitical space for these countries to inhabit; the fate of their economic and physical security is tied as much to their leaders’ personal chemistry, or lack thereof, with President Trump as to America’s formal security commitments, whose credibility had already come into question during the Obama administration.

It was inevitable that this adjustment from a period of US global leadership would happen at some point, and it seems unlikely that there will be a return to the status quo. The net result is that no country in the world has the luxury any more to free-ride on what has become a decaying American hegemony.

Hinge points in 2018

When all is said and done, it will be healthy for allies to escape their over-dependency on the United States. Although poll numbers continue to fluctuate, much of America’s population has become at best more ambivalent and at worst increasingly resentful of playing such a costly leadership role on the international stage.

But if other countries must take greater responsibility for their futures, this will pose new challenges, some of which will come to bear in 2018.

First, negotiations over Britain’s departure from the EU must not fall into a “cliff-edge” Brexit, with no clear sense of what the country’s future relationship will be with the EU. This should be economically and geopolitically self-evident for the British, although it might not seem so by the quality of the domestic British debate. But nor can the EU afford to lose the UK into a “splendid isolation” off the edge of the European continent, while grappling at the same time with a more anti-EU United States. Finding a resolution to its relations with the UK is largely in the EU’s gift, whereas this is not the case with the US.

If the two sides can arrive at a compromise, the EU may evolve into the UK’s second special relationship. And the prospects for a more strategically autonomous Europe could improve, with the UK committed to the security of its European neighbors through NATO and more comfortable with its post-Brexit security relationship with the EU, and with its EU neighbors more willing to integrate their security capabilities through EU institutions without British obstructionism.

Learn To Do Without US Leadership

This will also be the year where other nations need to demonstrate that coalitions of the willing can drive positive change on issues of global importance, even without US leadership. The successful follow-on summit to the Paris climate change agreement that President Macron held in Paris in December 2017 has shown that leading governments, working in tandem with major multinational corporations and international NGOs, can on occasion mobilize political and public action towards shared goals in the absence of US leadership.

On a more negative note, there is a high risk that US efforts to re-negotiate aspects of its key trading relationships, whether with Canada and Mexico in NAFTA or with China, will fail in 2018. With Congressional mid-term elections due in November, President Trump will be tempted to take unilateral action to demonstrate to his political base the seriousness of his intent to re-draw America’s terms of trade with some of its major partners. The EU, Japan, China, and others will have to work hard either to avoid this outcome or demonstrate that they can hold meaningful plurilateral and bilateral trade negotiations without US engagement.

The other wild card for 2018, of course, will remain North Korea. Here, there is no escaping the centrality of the US in any solution or, at least, the avoidance of a major escalation. But it would be far healthier in the future if the US administration could focus on critical questions of this sort, rather than having to apply its diplomatic time and capital simultaneously towards multiple other stand-offs where regional actors could play more constructive roles.

In the end, the rest of the world cannot and should not wait for the US to keep the world safe. Each country, each actor of scale–nationally, regionally, internationally–needs to step up to its own set of responsibilities as a beneficial stakeholder in the current system of international prosperity and relative stability that America has played such a central role in building.

The post A Dangerous New Normal appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

Faced with economic and social instability, countries are beginning to wind back the globalization clock. However, the international framework built after 1945 may well endure if policymakers take the right steps.

© REUTERS/Neil Hall

This year may be remembered as a turning point. The world appears to be pivoting away from a process of ever deepening integration and toward one characterized more by fragmentation and confrontation, both between and within states. We may even be witnessing a return to the anarchic society of nation states that followed their rise to prominence on the European continent in the 18th and 19th centuries. If so, the international institutions that provided the framework for “win-win” international relations after World War II will have proven only marginally more durable than their predecessors, which failed the tests of the 1930s.

A key question, therefore, is how the profound changes of the past half century – from advances in technology and communications to rising global wage levels and widespread urbanization – will interact with the re-emergence of these nationalist pressures.

Is the benign period of Western-led economic globalization coming to an end? What is driving the new era of populist, identity-led politics? How might these dynamics affect geopolitics? Finally, are existing international institutions capable of preventing a return to the violence and zero-sum thinking of the past – and if not, what are the alternatives?

The Global Economy: End of the Rope?

In the fifty years after 1945, citizens of the Western world grew accustomed to a slow but gradual improvement in their welfare and prosperity. The process began after the United States emerged as a victor from World War II and chose to extend a security umbrella under which its allies were able to rebuild their economies in a safe and rules-based environment. With US protection, all signed up to the notion that opening markets to trade and foreign investment was generally preferable to protection under state control.

This process of market opening has continued ever since. Multilateral trade rounds were shadowed by deeper regional initiatives, the most advanced being the EU’s 1992 single market, which removed regulatory barriers to trade. There are exceptions: agricultural markets remain highly protected, and all states retain sectoral restrictions on foreign direct investment. But overall, free markets became the norm.

After 1992 the European Union began its process of enlargement to the east, bringing workers with GDPs per capita far lower than those of their Western European counterparts into the EU. Investment flowed east, while workers from Central Europe traveled west. In Latin America, governments overcame their historical suspicions and sought opportunities to integrate with the US – Mexico joined the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) in 1994. Most significantly, China decided to open up its manufacturing markets to foreign trade and investment as a central lever to modernize its domestic economy. Its entry into the WTO in 2001, with US support, brought several hundred million well-educated, efficient, and low-paid Chinese workers into the global labor market.

The impact of these developments has been dramatic. The size of the global economy and, gradually, the global middle class grew. Cheap imports from China and other developing economies eased price inflationary pressures and helped raise living standards in the West.

But they also undercut the competitive dominance of many of their Western counterparts. This process was exacerbated by the high social costs of the Western welfare state, which had been affordable so long as Western countries were at the top of the value-added chain of global production, but looked increasingly unsustainable as these societies aged and others countries made the same products – or better – at far cheaper prices.

This decline in relative wealth across much of the West was disguised by a growing reliance on credit in the 1990s and early 2000s, as individuals borrowed against rising property prices and governments built up debt rather than reform welfare systems or raise taxes. In the end, this approach proved unsustainable, and collapsed in the global financial crisis of 2008. The good news was that governments in the West had learned the lessons of the 1930s and provided financial stimulus to ease the impacts of the crisis rather than raising protectionist barriers. But while economies stabilized, the political damage to the Western model that has served as the anchor of international prosperity and stability was immense.

The Rise of Identity Politics

When combined with the bad decisions and failed policies of the Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya interventions, and the lack of preparedness for subsequent waves of migrants and refugees, levels of popular trust in governments and elites across the West have plummeted in the past five years. Established political parties had already gravitated away from their ideological roots on the right and left toward the technocratic center in an effort to cope with the pressures of globalization. They have since proven themselves incapable of providing a convincing narrative that offers hope for the future or can explain how to cope with these challenges to large segments of their societies.

As was the case in times of previous major socio-economic disruptions, identity politics are stepping into the vacuum. The evidence is ubiquitous, with the rise of populist and nationalist parties in both the relatively wealthy North and more economically stressed South of Europe, as well as a virulent brand of populism among supporters of US presidential candidate Donald Trump. Each leader evokes the nostalgia of a more stable past, appealing to popular fears about an increasingly uncertain future. The Brexit victory in the United Kingdom’s referendum on EU membership was won by voters who wanted both to “take back control” of their national destiny and protest against the destructive personal impacts of globalization, including the ways that immigration appeared to be capping earning power while stressing public services.

The West has witnessed major socio-economic disruptions in the past, especially during the oil shock recessions of the 1970s. Are current generations being overly pessimistic when they now expect their children to be worse off in the future? There are two principal reasons for concern.

First, digital innovation appears to be on the brink of a new acceleration which could have a major disruptive impact on the employment prospects of the millions working in domestic service sectors and in white collar clerical work, people who were not affected by the changes in manufacturing employment brought about by the rise of industrial robotics and global supply chains.

Second, emerging economies appear to be struggling to transition from export-dependent, high investment, manufacturing-led economies to service-led, middle income economies. From China to Brazil and Indonesia to Turkey, the recent decline in growth rates may presage a politically disruptive period, especially as inequalities of wealth and opportunity widen. And emerging markets may not have the political resilience of the developed world.

There are two additional sources of concern. People across the world are now gathered in ever-growing urban agglomerations, many with the increased expectations of urban middle classes, others living on the edge of destitution. Both groups have ready access to information, making the work of governments in managing expectations far harder. Similarly, sub-Saharan and North African countries may not be able to cope with their enormous demographic youth bulges, leading to large new waves of migrants.

Under these pressures, the risk is that the leaders of emerging powers will nurture their own brands of identity politics, as Narendra Modi in India and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey already have.

The Return of Geopolitics

Despite the deep changes that have taken place in the global economy over the past 70 years, the building blocks of geopolitics are remarkably unchanged. States remain the dominant actors in the international system, and the same three states – the United States, Russia, and China – sit at the top of the geopolitical order. The UK and France remain in their roles as the principal reserve military powers, given their capabilities and positions as permanent members of the UN Security Council. Brazil, Germany, India, and Japan have become key players in their regions, but not yet at an international level.

The principal global institutions mirror this remarkable continuity. The permanent membership of the UN Security Council appears impervious to change, as does its governance structure. The roles of the IMF and World Bank have been called into question, and – with the arrival of the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank – challenged regionally, but there are as yet no challengers to their primacy at a global level. NATO and the EU continue to represent the interests of the West in and around Europe, while Russia now seeks to re-assert its sphere of influence around its neighborhood. Other regional organizations, from ASEAN to the Gulf Cooperation Council, continue to operate on an intergovernmental basis, more as forums for debate and coordination than for action.

The question is whether this continuity is now deceptive, and whether the political and geo-economic disruption described above is feeding into a more turbulent period geopolitically. The signs certainly seem to be pointing toward growing disconnection between the dynamics of 21st century economic integration and the persistence of 20th century geopolitics. As the disruptive aspects of global economic integration come to the fore, domestic identity politics are starting to morph into identity-based international politics. If expectations cannot be met domestically, leaders around the world will return to the tried and tested approach of finding distractions and enemies abroad. The positive dimension of identity politics is that it can be a unifying and motivating impulse domestically; but it generally means identifying yourself divisively against an “other”.

The most visible sign of this phenomenon is the re-emergence of “strongmen” leaders who express their determination to make their countries “great again.” Trump has been most explicit in his arguments, seeking to link the decline in living standards of working class Americans with the perceived decline in the status of the United States as a world power. But America’s return to “greatness” would be meaningless without a nation against which to measure the reversal of this perceived decline. Thus, Trump rails against China for undercutting the American worker, while making more positive comments about Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin, who embodies the sort of zero-sum outlook that his identity politics encourage.

For Putin, however, the US is both the principal obstacle to and greatest argument for Russia’s becoming great again. Creating a sphere of influence around Russia’s borders has the double benefit of insulating Putin’s domestic political power from external intrusion, while underpinning that power with a popular political pride, despite Russia’s continuing economic decline. As a number of Russia analysts have recently noted, Putin is slowly shifting his population into a defensive mobilization mentality that will make their integration into the global economy even more difficult.

The evolving situation in China is no less worrying. President Xi Jinping is in the midst of a drive to centralize political power, the scale of which has not been seen since the Mao era. There are many reasons for this drive, but high among them is the fear that the current difficult domestic economic transition will leave the Chinese Communist Party vulnerable to internal challenge and external pressure. One way for Xi to justify this process of centralization has been to launch a widespread, public campaign to root out “Western” influences in China, alongside a protracted anti-corruption purge. Escalating tensions with the US in the South China Sea have provided another impetus for solidifying popular support around the Party.

Even in Europe, domestic identity politics are blending with external considerations. Implicit in the UK Brexit campaign was the idea of escaping the cold embrace of the EU in order to make Britain great again on the world stage. And a subtext to the strongmen leadership styles of Viktor Orban in Hungary and Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland has been a need for these once great countries to stand up to the German leadership of the EU.

Finding Forces of Stability

Governments across the world are struggling to cope with the dizzyingly fast pace of economic, social, and technological change. Over the past sixty to seventy years, they have been able to turn to the institutions they built after the World War II and their successors – from the UN and IMF to the EU, WTO, and G20 – to help manage economic disruption and leverage positive change to create “absolute gains.”

Today, however, multilateral political and economic institutions appear to be incapable of managing the end of a period of historically unprecedented global economic growth. The problem is that the global economic integration of the past decades has led to changes in the balance of political power (including a decline in the acceptability of US leadership without a corresponding rise in the willingness of others to lead) that are not reflected in existing multilateral institutions. Reforming those institutions, absent a major global crisis like World War II, seems to be a forlorn hope.

Two positive avenues lie ahead as alternatives to a drift into greater instability. One is to reinforce those existing security institutions that can best play a deterrent role against the possible rise of conflict over the next decade. In Europe, the deterrent role of NATO against conflict escalation is once again central. US bilateral security alliances in Asia and the Middle East may also be of increasing importance. Equal effort must be put into reinforcing institutions such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which, however anachronistic its governance structure, at least provides a framework for controlling the spread of nuclear weapons.

The second, more difficult avenue is for governments across the world to focus on improving the quality of their own national governance. Administrative excellence, including effective tax collection, the use of e-government, and a focus on anticorruption; the modernization and disaggregation of energy infrastructure; preventing growing divergences between rural and urban development; investing in education and work apprenticeships; universal access to healthcare; better partnerships with business and civil society organizations – these should all be critical objectives today for developed, emerging, and developing countries alike. Trends that could pose disruptive risks could, with good governance, just as easily become parts of the solution. Building digitally-integrated urban areas, for example, could help manage mass populations, generate jobs, and sustain welfare systems for aged and young alike far more efficiently than today.

Delivering quality national governance will be essential if political leaders are to cope with the disruptive pace of change in the 21st century and avoid a return to the identity-led conflicts of the recent past. But to do so, popular majorities must demand professionalism from their leaders, rather than indulging in the short-term panacea of identity politics that so many of their leaders are peddling today.

Read more in the Berlin Policy Journal App – September/October 2016 issue.

The post World Order in Peril appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

(c) REUTERS/Toby Melville

This apparent disengagement by Britain is part of a broader set of actions that have given rise to a bout of national soul-searching about the country’s future role in the world while raising questions in European capitals and Washington about whether Britain can still be counted as one of the world’s major powers.

For example, can Britain help Europe craft effective responses to challenges in its neighborhood so long as Prime Minister David Cameron promises the country an in-out referendum on its EU membership should the Conservatives win the general election on May 7? The government also seems relaxed about allowing national defense spending to fall below 2 percent of GDP six months after hosting a NATO summit at which it pledged – along with other members of the alliance – to uphold this threshold. And, as the recent report by the British House of Commons Defense Committee noted, British troops are now largely absent in Iraq as other Western countries help the Iraqi government battle the Islamic State. What happened to Britain rejecting the notion of “strategic shrinkage,” as former Foreign Secretary William Hague put it at the beginning of the coalition government?

Rebuilding Foundations

While these are fair questions, Britain’s seeming lack of engagement in the Ukraine crisis does not paint an accurate picture of the country’s overall foreign policy. First, the government’s core priority is to rebuild the foundation of the UK’s long-term economic prosperity. The financial crisis of 2007-08 exposed the bankruptcy of a British economic model that was overly reliant on private debt, public sector spending, and tax income from a financial sector on steroids.

As a result, the government has been willing to let certain key defense capabilities lapse, including essential assets such as maritime patrol aircraft, in the belief that it will be able to reinvest in the country’s military power capabilities later. Instead, the government has prioritized what it terms “commercial diplomacy,” leveraging Britain’s diplomatic connections and historic links to generate trade with and investment from emerging markets.

Second, British public opinion is suffering more than most from intervention fatigue following the country’s expensive and bloody interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. In August 2013 the government lost a parliamentary vote on military intervention in Syria and changed its policy, a climb down clearly attributable to the government’s unwillingness to take on a public estimated to be 70 percent opposed to any such intervention. The government must also manage a far more complex domestic political environment. A historic fragmentation of the British party system is currently underway, with the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the Scottish Nationalists likely to play an important role in the outcome of the upcoming election, making the government far more risk-averse than in the past.

Third, the fact is that all governments inhabit a world in which the exercise of national power to achieve external goals is exceedingly difficult, and all countries, Britain included, are currently more selective in where they put their effort. In this context, the British government has made some intelligent choices in the past five years. Sustaining its pledge to spend 0.7 percent of national GDP on overseas assistance allows Britain to help promote stability and growth in parts of the world that would otherwise likely become sources of regional and international instability.

Its chairmanship of the G7 in 2013 put the notion of “open government” at the vanguard of the international agenda at a time of growing public frustration with tax avoidance by multinationals and opaque, sometimes corrupt, tendering processes for major international infrastructure projects. Its campaign against sexual violence in conflicts has made it harder for governments inside and outside conflict zones to turn a blind eye to this devastating phenomenon. The government has also been right to focus on strengthening domestic and international cybersecurity. And the decision to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank as a founding member, while taken with one eye on future business and financing opportunities, also underscored the government’s desire to ensure that investment in the long-term growth of developing countries takes place within as transparent an environment as possible.

Sometimes Absence Helps

At the same time, accusations about Britain’s absence from key recent international crises do not assess whether more overt UK involvement would actually have been helpful. If Britain, one of America’s closest allies and a country with poor bilateral relations with Moscow, had demanded a leadership role alongside Merkel in the Minsk negotiations with Putin, this would probably have made agreement more difficult to achieve. Instead, the German government has been able to rely on full British support in developing a tough line on EU sanctions against Russia, including UK acceptance of the impact on the City of London’s role as a base for Russian corporate financing. In a similar vein, overt interference by the British government, as the former colonial power, in support of the “Occupy Central” protesters in Hong Kong in 2014 would probably have made it harder for the various parties to arrive at a peaceful solution.

The notion of British retreat from the world stage needs a more dispassionate assessment. Britain still has the world’s fifth-highest defense budget, the sixth-largest economy, one of its two leading financial centers, and is the second-largest contributor of international financial assistance. It remains one of five permanent members of the UN Security Council and a nuclear power. Not bad for a country representing under one percent of the world’s population. British diplomatic influence is enhanced by its membership in some of the world’s key institutions, from the EU, NATO, and G7 to the G20 and the Commonwealth. And Britain’s capacity to coalesce solutions benefits from the use of English as a global lingua franca, by London’s status as a global hub, and the reach and influence of its media, universities, and non-governmental organizations.

In addition, current public antipathy to British overseas military interventions could ease in the future, especially if the threat posed by the Islamic State starts to seriously undermine British domestic security. And, while Britain may not have been in the diplomatic lead on Ukraine, there is stronger British public support for sustaining sanctions than in many other EU member states, as well as a strong belief that Britain should retain a wider international role. Being an ally to Merkel at this stage, therefore, may be more useful than trying to be a leader in the EU.

Great Still

There are, though, two serious worries for the future. The first is the government’s willingness to countenance a further decline in British defense spending. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Britain has an institutional responsibility to help sustain peace and stability across the world, over and above its self-interest as a nation heavily dependent on a stable global economy. The trajectory of defense spending means that the UK may be unable to fulfill this role for at least a period of five to ten years from 2016-17. While this might have been an acceptable trade-off in 2010, it is not in 2015, when Russian defense spending has moved in the opposite direction and reasons for it to interfere in European security have multiplied.

The second worry is that widespread ambivalence across Britain about the value of EU membership is undermining the capacity of British policymakers to offer leadership within the EU at a time of unprecedented risk and uncertainty. An energy union, a single digital market, service sector reform, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) are all essential components of future British prosperity and security, but very few British politicians are stepping forward to make this case. Instead, the sense of drift over Europe undermines the capacity of other major actors like Germany to play as strategic a role as they might like, given that UK presence and support cannot be taken for granted.

At a time when national power is more difficult to wield effectively than ever and leadership requires partnership, the British obsession with wondering whether it would be better off in or out of Europe is a dangerous self-indulgence that undermines its international influence.

Read more articles from the April 2015 issue FOR FREE in the Berlin Policy Journal App.

The post Not Going AWOL appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.