Is Britain's decline and fall unavoidable?

The United Kingdom in 2011 is at a strategic tipping point. We have to decide whether we wish to remain a global power, with a global role, or whether we are to accept the supposedly inevitable and decline to the status of a middling European power with only a regional one.

Many believe that the UK has already arrived at the latter destination. They are wrong. In spite of our small size, the UK retains a number of significant comparative advantages over other medium-sized states that continue to afford us a unique and important place in the modern world. These include the status of English as the global language of business and diplomacy, our permanent seat on the UN Security Council, the international predominance of English common law and the unique set of diplomatic and trading relationships afforded by the Commonwealth. We remain a highly innovative and prosperous nation, the world's tenth largest exporter and sixth largest importer, and London is still the world's most important financial centre.

Necessarily consistent with this status, we have also remained one of just a handful of countries with the capacity to project influence, including military influence where required, anywhere in the world.

Today, however, this position is in very real danger. Though we retain the potential and many of the assets necessary to operate as a global power, a number of the enablers that we depend upon to project and sustain that influence are being eroded away, if not deleted outright. At the heart of the problem is the fact that the UK does not possess a proper national strategy, and has not done so since at least 1989.

National strategy is what enables a country to have real direction and strength. National strategy seeks to further the national interest through the effective coordination of all instruments of power, be they economic, political, cultural, military or diplomatic. It is guided by a clear understanding of what the country stands for, what sort of power it wants to be in the world, and what it understands about the geopolitical environment in which it operates.

Without a coherent national strategy, a country is much more likely to pursue, without redress, courses of action that are uncoordinated and counterproductive, and even the most powerful nation risks being overwhelmed by forces it did not predict and cannot control.

The government will claim it has a national strategy, the National Security Strategy (NSS) released in October 2010, but that does not constitute a real national strategy, and nor can it. National strategy is altogether broader than national security strategy, and should constitute the conceptual framework within which the latter is directed and fashioned.

The evidence of our government’s failure in this regard is made manifestly clear in the dichotomy between its aspirations for the UK, and the reality of the policies it pursues to that end. In the NSS, the government rightly concluded that “Britain's national interest requires us to reject any notion of the shrinkage of our influence”, but it has adopted a course of action that threatens precisely that outcome.

Nowhere is this disturbing new reality better demonstrated than in the context of our response to the Libya crisis. At the very same moment as the government resolved to embark upon this intervention, the rationale for which entirely befits the strategic calculations and aspirations of a global power, than it was in the process of deleting the very capabilities necessary to prosecute that campaign effectively. Indeed, it is only because the crisis broke out so soon after the publication of the NSS and Strategic Defence & Security Review (SDSR), that a number of the assets subsequently used had not already been decommissioned.

Across the board, whether it be the deletion of our independent aircraft carrier capability, the reduction in the number of maritime task groups from two to one, the cancellation of many upgrades to vital weapons systems or of course the loss of tens of thousands of highly-skilled personnel, we are in the process of removing the enablers we depend upon to protect our global interests and sustain our influence.

But it is not just in the realm of hard power that we are becoming dangerously weakened; many of our most important soft power assets are also being reduced. The Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO), for instance, is seeing reductions in an already overstretched diplomatic corps from 4,300 staff to fewer than 3,900, whilst the BBC World Service is suffering five full language closures and the end of radio programmes in seven languages, including Russian, Mandarin Chinese and Hindi.

Many will argue that in today’s straightened economic times, we cannot afford to sustain these capabilities, and that anyway, today we are no longer threatened by the kind of existential threats that once made those capabilities necessary. But this is to ignore a very important and unchanging fact: ultimately it is power that underpins the prosperity and freedoms that so many of us take for granted.

During the Cold War, the Soviets did not remain in Eastern Europe out of choice, or because it was the right thing to do, but because they were kept there by NATO and the nuclear deterrent. If we are not threatened in that manner today, it is only because we, working with our allies, have retained the capabilities necessary to keep those threats at bay, and where necessary, to pre-empt them. These threats have not ceased to exist.

Those who believe that we can permanently rely on collective security or the supposedly benign nature of the world to keep us safe are wrong. We play a very dangerous game if we think we can invest our national resources into enhancing our prosperity and advancing our interests, whilst simultaneously surrendering the capabilities necessary to defend them when threatened.

If the government had a coherent national strategy it would recognise this fact and act accordingly. As it is, we are fast approaching the point where, though we still aspire to a global role, we find we no longer have the capabilities necessary to pursue one effectively, and this will be to our very great cost. It is not too late for the government to redress this dangerous situation, but the window of opportunity will not remain open indefinitely.

George Grant is the Director for Global Security at The Henry Jackson Society and co-author with Bernard Jenkin MP of The Tipping Point: British National Strategy and the UK’s Future World Role, released in July 2011.