This year, the electorate in the UK will go to the polls as Keir Starmer’s Labour Party seeks to snatch strength from the Conservative Party for the first time since 1997. It’s hard to overstate how much global has replaced in recent years. When former Prime Minister Tony Blair entered Downing Street 27 years ago, Britain’s economy was bigger than India and China combined. The United Kingdom still administered a giant Asian city, Hong Kong, as a colony. Global temperatures rise relative to the long-term average by less than a fraction of what it is today. And U. S. dominance was so striking that some saw the spread of the liberal democratic style as inevitable.
Today, the global order is messy and multipolar. China has a superpower, with an economy five times the size of the UK. But there has also been a movement of force to more states since I was minister almost 19 years ago. As a result, geopolitics is taking a stand in a much busier forum. The countries described in those pages through CIA Director William Burns as the “center of coverage” make deals and identify their own systems in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Most of the news is grim: wars are increasing in scale and intensity. Democracies are lagging behind. Climate breakdown is no longer a long-term concern; it’s already there. But the task of saving the planet has begun in earnest as states compete and cooperate in a forced transition on which humanity’s long-term depends.
However, instead of having a transparent view of the global and rising to the challenge, the Conservative Party, for 14 years, has turned the British government inwards. Successive Conservative governments have sunk deep into nostalgia and denial of the UK’s position in the world. The government, for example, withdrew from the European Union without a transparent plan on how to proceed. He treated the country’s global reputation for upholding the rule of law with contempt, threatening to jeopardise the Good Friday Agreement (which brought peace to Northern Ireland) and abandon the European Convention on Human Rights. When China, the U. S. , and the EU developed competitive green trade policies to reclaim the industries of the future, the U. K. government didn’t follow suit. Instead, it squandered the UK’s climate leadership by abandoning the grid. -Zero-carbon commitments, which derailed business plans.
Conservative officials have been particularly callous in their strategy toward the Global South. Over the past decade, they have undermined the UK’s position as a superforce for progress with a mismanaged merger of government departments that has devalued expertise and forced cuts to very important programmes. of fighting to win the hearts and minds of the new global middle class, they addressed this organization in offensive tones, such as when then-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson publicly recited a colonialist poem through Rudyard Kipling during a stopover in Myanmar in 2017. The government has undermined one of the UK’s greatest strengths – its comfortable strength – by attacking institutions such as universities, the courts and the BBC.
Repairing this damage may not be easy. The UK economy is stuck in a low-growth quagmire. The British Army has fewer foot soldiers than at any time since the Napoleonic era. Many utilities are on their knees. But if the Labour Party wins the next election, it may be offering a decade of national renewal, as well as a lucid technique for foreign relations: progressive realism.
Progressive realism advocates the use of realistic means to pursue progressive goals. For the UK government, this demands unwavering honesty about the UK, the balance of forces and the state of the world. But instead of realism’s logic of just gathering strength, progressive realism uses it in the service of just goals, such as fighting climate change, protecting democracy, and promoting global economic development. It is the pursuit of ideals without deceiving oneself about what is attainable.
The path to a progressive and realistic foreign policy lies with two of the UK’s most sensible foreign ministers. Born into crippling rural poverty and orphaned as a child, he became Foreign Minister in 1945 after a career in the industrial sector. trade union leader and Labour politician. Within weeks of taking office, Bevin was catapulted into New World Order negotiations with U. S. President Harry Truman and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
Bevin devoted himself to realism, a politics based on respect for facts. This determination has proven to be essential for European security. He bolstered vacillating Americans during the Soviet blockade of Berlin from 1948 to 1949 by clarifying what was at stake for U. S. officials, advocated a West German state as an anchor for the West, and convinced British Prime Minister Clement Atlee that the United Kingdom deserved to obtain nuclear weapons. His greatest achievement was convincing the skeptical Truman leadership to devote themselves to a NATO alliance that explicitly stated that an attack on one of its members was an attack on all members: the totemic Article Five of the treaty. Thanks to Bevin’s work, the alliance stayed together. April this year marked the fifth anniversary of NATO’s founding.
But Bevin, like many wonderful politicians, is a product of his time. He also casually justified the errors of colonialism by claiming that such measures were taken in the national interest. Nor did he live in a global world where the West had to cooperate with its rivals in meteorology and synthetic intelligence. Today, realism alone will not be enough to save the planet.
To achieve this, democracies will also have to draw on the culture of another wonderful fashionable British Foreign Secretary: Robin Cook. When he came to power in 1997, Cook presented a vision of a foreign policy with “a moral dimension” while acknowledging that the UK’s security will have to come first. Thanks to the strength of his convictions, he placed climate replacement at the centre of the Foreign Office’s calendar for the first time in history, brought human rights into the diplomatic mainstream, advocated for a global solution banning landmines and mobilised the British government’s allies to fight the war. Along with Blair, he helped the U. K. become a strong force in foreign progress by committing the country to the U. N. aid target of 0. 7 percent.
There was also realism in Cook; he opposed the war in Iraq, with warnings that are now considered prophetic. However, Cook’s vision of adding more ethics to foreign policy runs counter to the limits of idealism, especially when it comes to potential difficult choices when it comes to potential arms exports. options. But those limitations don’t mean that idealism doesn’t have a place in foreign policy. Just because someone is progressive doesn’t mean they can’t be realistic. Similarly, governments do not have to decide between values and interests.
And the UK doesn’t. In Bevin’s view, you have to be realistic about the state of the world and the country’s role in it. Like Cook, however, the country embraces a progressive conviction in its ability to champion multilateral causes, build institutions, protect democracy, protect the state. of the law, fight poverty and combat climate change.
Progressive realism worthy of being called begins by being fair to the assumptions made in the West in the afterlife that have been proven wrong. The broad consensus that economic globalization would inevitably lead to liberal democratic values has been shown to be false. more dependent on authoritarian states, and the share of global industry among democracies will fall from 74% in 1998 to 47% in 2022. China is a strikingly striking example. The country was admitted to the World Trade Organization in 2001 in the hope that political reforms would be in line with economic reforms. But the state has become more repressive as the economy has opened up.
The rise of China, which now has the world’s largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity, ended the era of U. S. hegemony. The global is shaped through the festival between Beijing and Washington. from the development of green technologies and long-term supply chains to the sourcing and processing of critical raw materials. But the festival is especially fierce when it comes to security. China’s military has the largest number of warships in the world. According to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, China’s shipbuilding capacity is about 230 times greater than that of the United States. Beijing’s growing military strength, in turn, has helped Russia meet the challenge in Europe. To compete with China, the U. S. inevitably needs to pay more attention to the Indo-Pacific region. This shift will come even as Europe worryingly relies on the United States to end Moscow’s war on Ukraine.
China is not the only emerging force in the world. An organization of developing states, joined by Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have claimed seats at the table. They and others have the strength to shape their regional environment, and forget about the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In the 20th century, some of those states aligned themselves with rival blocs led by superforces. But today, in order to maximize their autonomy, they are making agreements with all the primary countries. Their infamous indifference to many U. S. appeals is partly the result of the West’s chaotic military interventions in the early decades of this century. The mistakes of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lithrougha undermined the concept that liberal interventionism was, as Blair noted in 1999, “a more sophisticated set of mutual interests and ethical objectives. “Instead, it came to be seen as a recipe for clutter.
A British government that adheres to progressive realism will not repeat those mistakes. That said, the past decade has made it clear that inaction also comes at high costs. The failure of the United States to live up to its red line against the use of chemical weapons in Syria has not only consolidated the monstrous regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad; it has also emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin. He concluded that the West no longer had the courage to protect the rules-based order and, by annexing Crimea, implemented the logic of what David Miliband, another former Labour foreign secretary, called “the age of impunity. “When the West responded to this provocation with mild sanctions, Putin concluded that he could fundamentally alter the world order in 2022.
Still, the West is taking Moscow’s risks seriously. European states increasingly see Russia as a long-term generational risk that demands a long-term generational response. This will require Bevin’s resilience and determination, but the West has yet to win. As Fiona Hill, former senior director of the U. S. National Security Council, said in 2023, war has become a substitute for an uprising of the “remnant” opposed to the West. Over the past two years, countries that together make up about two-thirds of the world’s population have abstained or voted against motions to censure Putin. Many of those countries have rejected Western attempts to convince them, accusing the West of double-standards and pointing out that its interest in their wishes has been inconsistent at best. Given the West’s hoarding of COVID-19 vaccines and its insufficient moves to mitigate climate-related loss and damage, they are right.
Addressing the deteriorating global security scenario facing the UK is the central task and number one duty of British foreign policy. This policy will be based on the country’s relations with the United States and Europe. These two powers are the pillars on which the United Kingdom stands. It builds their security, but the government’s relations with them will have to evolve. Americans increasingly want to be convinced that the Europeans are doing enough to protect the security of their own continent. And as the U. S. focuses more on Asia, it will have less room to act elsewhere. The United Kingdom is ready to engage in complicated burden-sharing discussions, provided they are part of a serious process that strengthens collective security.
To cope with those changes, it is increasingly vital that the UK develops closer foreign and security cooperation with the EU. Both sides want to be fair about the gravity of this moment. From Ukraine to Gaza and the Sahel, there is an arc of shock and instability within and near Europe’s borders that also affects the interests of the UK and the continent. However, the European Union and the British government have no formal means of cooperation. Faced with this problem, the United Kingdom will have to seek a new geopolitical association with the EU. The centerpiece of this dating deserves to be a security pact that promotes closer coordination on a wide range of military, economic, climate, health, cyber and energy security issues, and that complements both sides’ unwavering commitment to NATO, which will continue to be the main commitment. European security vehicle. The UK is also expected to strengthen its close relations with France, Germany, Ireland and Poland. It is worth, for example, pursuing an Anglo-German defense agreement to accompany the similar Lancaster House treaties it signed with France in 2010.
Above all, the UK will have to continue towards Ukraine. The long-term of European security depends on the final results of the war there, and the British government will have to give the Kremlin confidence that it will press ahead with Kyiv for as long as it takes to achieve victory. Once Ukraine has triumphed, the UK has to play a leading role in securing Ukraine’s position in NATO.
European security will be the priority of Labour’s foreign policy. But the British government cannot concentrate exclusively on the continent. Realism also means recognising that the Indo-Pacific region will be central to global prosperity and security in the coming decades, and that the UK will be committed to this region as well. The country got off to a smart start by contributing to the creation of AUKUS, a nuclear and submarine generation pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. However, the UK government deserves to regard AUKUS cooperation as a floor, not a ceiling. It also wants to build other regional relationships, deepening its security partnerships with Japan and South Korea. India, to which the UK is closely connected through countless family circles. It is expected to become the world’s third-largest economy by 2030. But the British government has yet to deliver on the long-promised industrial deal with New Delhi.
Then, China. La UK’s strategy towards the country has fluctuated wildly over the past 14 years. Former Prime Minister David Cameron attempted to create what he called a “golden age” of engagement with Beijing in 2015, which led to open hostility when Liz Truss became prime minister in September 2022. British politics has returned under the leadership of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who appointed Cameron his foreign secretary at the end of 2023, in confusing ambiguity.
Instead, the UK wants to adopt a more coherent strategy, one that challenges, competes with and cooperates with China where appropriate. Such a technique would recognize that Beijing represents a systemic challenge to British interests and that the Chinese Communist Party represents true security. Threats. But it would also acknowledge China’s importance to the UK economy. He would be content with the fact that no group of states can deal with the global threats of the climate crisis, pandemics, and synthetic intelligence without cooperating with Beijing. There is a difference between “harm” reduction and decoupling, and it is in everyone’s interest that China’s relationship with the West continues and evolves.
As British Shadow Foreign Secretary, I have travelled extensively throughout North Africa and the Middle East, including Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. All will be key partners for the UK during this decade, especially as the country seeks to rebuild Gaza and achieve, as soon as imaginable, a two-state solution. Since the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas, the Labor Party has adhered to progressive principles, urgently calling for full respect for foreign law by all parties. The United Kingdom cannot put an end to this terrible conflict. But it has the ability to accumulate aid to help rebuild, and one of Labour’s key objectives is to negotiate with foreigners. partners to recognize Palestine as a state, to help secure a negotiated two-state solution.
Progressive realism recognizes that at certain points in the 20th century, Western powers have infringed on the sovereignty of weaker states, especially in the Global South. But in the 21st century, a Labour government would see its project as supporting state sovereignty as opposed to forces such as Russian neo-imperialism, climate and corruption. That is why progressive realism seeks the same thing for Ukraine, Israel and Palestine: that they be a sovereign state, secure, identified throughout the world and at peace with their neighbors.
Moreover, in today’s world, Western governments want to partner with countries in the Global South. Here is a possible convening role for a revitalized Commonwealth. In particular, our government would work to address the climate crisis, the most internal and the maximum. universal source of clutter. So far, the world’s reaction – spending only about $2 trillion on the green transition last year alone – has at times been its best hope. But the major powers have not yet done enough to avert catastrophe, and the fight for an essential raw material, which is now at the heart of the foreign policy of all the major powers, will not help poorer countries pay for the transition. Progressive realism calls for a more cooperative approach. Realists recognize that if justice is not part of a global climate agreement, it will fail.
Progressive realism also means acknowledging that climate change is not the only risk to the planet. Technological change also contributes to the new global disorder by fueling inequality and populism. Movements attacking liberal values are multiplying thanks to social networking sites hijacking algorithms designed to magnify excessive positions. The rise of synthetic intelligence offers huge prospects for expansion and innovation, but AI is already making it less difficult for bad actors to suppress freedoms, spread disinformation, and undermine democratic processes. To minimize those risks, progressive realists want to identify global barriers to generation with the broadest conceivable coalition of countries, before it’s too late.
Finally, progressive realism means waiting to see how the dynamics between continents are about to change. By 2050, more than one in four people on the planet will live in Africa. The continent can and will generate abundant growth. Still, Cook would be appalled if we saw the poverty that persists there, despite the efforts of his generation. Therefore, the next Labour government will have to expand a new strategy for Africa that does more than just offer aid. The UK wants to be a leader in progress again, but to do so, it wants to adopt a style that emphasises industry with other countries to build long-term win-win partnerships, rather than following an outdated style of patronage.
To achieve its ambitions, the next British government will want to revitalize its economy. Surprisingly, the UK, a traditionally trading country, now has the lowest investment levels of all the G7 states. A prosperous economy is the foundation of our national prosperity and global influence. That is why Starmer has promised that the country will deliver the largest sustained expansion of the G7 if he is elected prime minister. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs can help achieve this purpose by revitalizing economic diplomacy. To this end, if I become Foreign Secretary, I will prioritize having each and every British ambassador in each and every applicable market announce investments in the state. I will also convene a new business advisory council to ensure that business wishes convey our diplomatic thinking. To ensure domestic prosperity, the UK will need to re-establish itself as an accepted and trusted partner – that is, with its allies. That is why the Labor Party will seek to improve the country’s industrial and investment relations with Europe, as well as with India and the United States. Brexit is resolved; a Labor government would not seek to rejoin the EU, the single market or the customs union. However, there are many pragmatic steps we can take to rebuild cooperation and reduce barriers to the industry.
A Labor government would also invest in the green transition. Countries around the world are competing intensely to attract personal capital to blank technologies, a festival that has been exacerbated by the US Inflation Reduction Act and the EU Green Deal. The United Kingdom would not be afraid to jump into this race. A Labor government, for example, would create a new national wealth fund that would invest in hydrogen, renewable energy, green metals and other climate-friendly industries that would provide a long-term return for taxpayers. Our key principle would be to use public investment to unlock new personal investments. investment.
But our technique for dealing with replacement will not concentrate only on national development. International climate relations are at the heart of progressive realism, and a Labour government would put the fight against greenhouse gases at the heart of our agenda. We would concentrate, for example, on cutting emissions from our partners by seeking to identify a blank power alliance (indeed, an opposing OPEC) made up of states committed to leading the way in decarbonizing electric power systems. Our government would also help reform foreign monetary establishments to supply much more for the climate. adaptation.
However, to become a green powerhouse, the UK needs its reputation and tools. The country deserves to avoid issuing new licenses to explore for oil and fuel in the North Sea. It will also have to decarbonise its electric power formula by 2030.
Achieving the latter purpose will require a large deployment of renewable energy. Labour’s timetable is to triple solar, quadruple offshore wind, double onshore wind and expand nuclear, hydrogen and tidal power. This means that the UK wants to forge new regulatory and investment partnerships. Abroad. Because the resources needed to decarbonize economies increase across borders, no country can go green without foreign cooperation. A Labour government would help foster such collaboration by creating a new network of climate and energy diplomats. They would help our government channel one of Cook’s core beliefs: that foreign policy will have to generate greater effects for everyone.
In the face of the disorder, conflicts, and crises that plague the world, it is easy to despair. Wars are multiplying and tensions between the great powers are intensifying. Climate change has subjected all continents to fatal extreme weather conditions and led to droughts and famines.
The UK, however, can cope with the demands of this new era. Its economy is the sixth largest in the world. It is home to state-of-the-art technologies and services, leading universities, cutting-edge legal sectors, and colorful cultural industries. It offers unprecedented prospects for partnerships and alliances. The country can prosper and repair its reputation as a net contributor to global security and progress if it renews its alliances and regains its self-confidence. Once again, you may decide to face today’s demanding generational situations. and embark on a new path, building on the most productive aspects of their past.
To achieve this, the UK will have to take advantage of what is in fact the highest productivity in its history. If the government’s reaction to global unrest is rooted in nostalgia and denial of the Conservative Party, it will fail to succeed in the multilateral arena. agreements needed to resolve global unrest. If progressives believe that international relations means competing with those who do not always share a percentage of democratic values, that will damage British interests. If the government fails to present a bold and progressive vision, it will have to forget its objective. And if the state cannot guarantee national and regional security, it will have failed in its ultimate indispensable task.
Progressive politics without realism is meaningless idealism. Realism without a sense of progress can be cynical and tactical. But when progressives act realistically and practically, they replace the world. The UK urgently wants a foreign policy that combines the most productive aspects of Bevin and Cook. He wants progressive realism to usher in an era of renewal, with a clearer and more hopeful vision of the country’s role in the world.