Britain’s strategic priorities have changed. Australia must take note

The British government formally launched its new National Security Strategy last Monday. Publication of the much-anticipated document came on the heels of the NATO summit a fortnight earlier, at which Britain, along with all other NATO members (except Spain) pledged to lift their defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP by 2034.

Given domestic pressures on the budget in Britain and other NATO countries, that is probably unachievable. Nevertheless, there is now bipartisan agreement in the UK on an urgent need to significantly elevate defence spending over the coming decade. The National Security Strategy is premised on that expectation.

Keir Starmer and Anthony Albanese during the G7 Leaders’ Summit in Kananaskis, Canada, in June.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

With Anthony Albanese visiting China this week, and as we await the outcome of the Colby review of AUKUS, Australian eyes are rightly focused on Beijing and Washington. Why should strategic decisions made in London matter to Australia?

The United Kingdom has long been, second only to the United States, our most important strategic partner: through the Five Eyes security network, the Five Power Defence arrangements, and now through AUKUS. This has also been our most longstanding military and intelligence relationship and – at a time of American unpredictability – our most reliable one.

A significant reorientation of the foreign policy of such an important ally – particularly when it involves a change of its approach to our region – matters a great deal.

The launch of the National Security Strategy coincided with the first anniversary of the election of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government. Starmer’s landslide victory after a campaign in which he made himself the smallest possible target was overwhelmingly driven by public contempt for what had become a comically dysfunctional Conservative government.

Starmer’s one-word slogan “Change” captured the public mood but, in its very vacuousness, also demonstrated how anaemic Labour’s offering was. The only message was “we’re not them”.

Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president (left); Keir Starmer, UK’s prime minister; and Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, at London in March.Credit: Bloomberg

Domestically, Starmer has had a miserable first year. The economy is in a worse condition than it was when he was elected, capital is fleeing in the face of punitive taxes, and the number of illegal arrivals across the English Channel has exploded to 44,000 on Labour’s watch. As his government marked its first anniversary, a backbench revolt forced it to abandon reforms to the welfare system, leading to a £5 billion fiscal hole which will undoubtedly be filled with yet higher taxes, accelerating the capital flight. It all has a very retro, 1970s feel.

The abysmal state of the nation is, naturally, reflected in opinion polls: Labour’s support has collapsed to 23.9 per cent, nearly five points behind Nigel Farage’s insurgent Reform Party. While the Tories remain a joke, Labour is already being seen as a failed experiment.

Yet amid the domestic gloom, foreign policy has, to the surprise of many, emerged as Starmer’s strong suit. What has stood out, in particular, has been his deft handling of Donald Trump – a feat that has eluded most world leaders. On Friday, it was announced that Trump will visit Scotland next month, when he will combine the opening of a new golf course with a bilateral meeting with Starmer. Later in the year, he will be flattered by the panoply of a full state visit, at the invitation of King Charles. Two visits in six months (plus an early and successful visit by Starmer to the White House) is pretty effective diplomacy. Some prime ministers can’t even get a meeting.

The National Security Strategy is the most important restatement of British foreign policy under Labour. It represents a significant recalibration of Britain’s priorities.

In 2021, the Conservative covernment’s key strategic document, the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, proclaimed a policy of “global Britain”, premised on the belief that strategic priorities should reflect the fact that the UK’s interests had global reach. At the heart of Global Britain was the so-called “Indo-Pacific tilt” – a commitment to closer engagement with our region, which placed Australia at the heart of Britain’s plans to elevate its horizons beyond the Euro-Atlantic.

Labour, when in opposition, was always sceptical of the globalist ambitions of the Indo-Pacific tilt. To their eyes, this smacked of Johnsonian romanticism – the fanciful conceit that post-Brexit Britain could resume the role in the world it had not enjoyed for more than half a century.

The policy shift marks a deliberate narrowing of the focus of Britain’s strategic thinking. Global Britain is gone. Reference to the Indo-Pacific tilt is nowhere to be found. Rather, it declares that in future, Britain’s interests will be largely confined to its own region: “The hard realities of our geography, security and trade necessitate a prioritisation of the Euro-Atlantic area as part of our ‘NATO first’ approach.”

In a document of 52 pages, there are only three references to Australia. At the launch event at the Council on Geostrategy in London last Monday, authors of the document were at pains to emphasise the importance of AUKUS, but even that was seen by them primarily in terms of the UK’s relationship with the United States, as well as its potential to expand Britain’s industrial base. The importance of AUKUS for the relationship with Australia was barely mentioned.

In 1968, the Labour government of Harold Wilson made the historic announcement that Britain no longer considered that it had vital strategic interests “east of Suez”. This government will not use that language. But it is fairly clear from its National Security Strategy that Keir Starmer’s thinking is much of a piece with Wilson’s.

George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is a professor at the ANU’s National Security College.

Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.