China or America? Boris Johnson’s Brexit Britain seeks a new strategy as Sino-US rivalry deepens

Britain needs friends both old (the US) and new (China), but openly courting Chinese investment, especially in tech, will sever transatlantic relations, while hewing to US sanctions will lose Britain the massive Chinese market

Vasilis Trigkas

Published: 9:00pm, 14 Aug 2019

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Lord Palmerston best described Britain’s grand strategy when he declared that the country has no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies: “Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”

And one perpetual British interest is that no state in continental Europe should ever be allowed to establish continental hegemony. So Britain has acted as an offshore balancer, pivoting to the weaker continental coalition and allying with almost every single major power of continental Europe before eventually balancing against its former allies when those became dangerously strong.

This was also why, in the past century, Britain fought in the first and second world wars, and joined the cold war. Its cautious membership of the European Community was to ensure that European integration would never exceed the absolute minimum required to balance the Soviet threat.

When this threat was eclipsed in the early 1990s, Britain opted out of the next ambitious stage of the European Union: the European Monetary System, which led to the euro zone.

In a sense, the Brexit process was initiated not by former prime minister David Cameron’s strategic blunder in accepting a 2016 referendum, but grew from the British decision back in 1992 to preserve its monetary autonomy.

Since then, Britain has opposed every major integrationist European reform, including defence initiatives that shifted the focus from Nato to a European army. In that role, Britain has found utility in its special relationship with the United States.

With the US security umbrella covering Europe, Britain could ensure that “Russia would be out and Germany would be down”. No hegemon would be able to unify continental Europe and turn the British Isles into peripheral rocks under the strategic custody of a continental European empire.

But the safe and simple global chessboard of the early 1990s, with the US as a unipolar superpower and no major European continental power established, has been turned upside down just three decades later. Germany has acquired an economic and, to a certain degree, political monopoly over the continent, while America’s global hegemony is being challenged by China’s meteoric recovery.

In 2015, Cameron took Chinese President Xi Jinping to a pub for fish and chips, and Sino-British relations entered a “golden era”. China announced generous investments in Britain, offered support for London’s ambition to become a yuan financial hub, and agreed to help build nuclear power plants in Hinkley. Moreover, Huawei would be a strategic partner in developing Britain’s 5G telecommunications infrastructure.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and then-British prime minister David Cameron drink pints of beer at the Plough pub in Princess Risborough near Chequers, in 2015. A Chinese company later bought the pub. Photo: AFP

The British honeymoon with China came at a strategically convenient moment. Brexiters argued that by exiting the EU, Britain would be able to establish free-trade zones with both China and the US, the world’s largest economies. British prosperity would thus be perpetual.

Yet geopolitics struck back with a vengeance. By 2018, the US was demanding that Britain choose between its intelligence partnership and its commercial partnership with Huawei.

Meanwhile, an asynchronous British cabinet managed to derail Britain's relationship with both the US and China. Earlier this year, when Philip Hammond, the chancellor of the exchequer, was to visit China to negotiate a trade deal, then-defence secretary Gavin Williamson dispatched a gunboat to the South China Sea, infuriating the Chinese, who cancelled the British commercial mission.

Boris Johnson was chosen by the Conservative party to become prime minister and lead Britain at a time of unprecedented strategic complexity. His first priority, however, must be domestic, aiming to unify a divided nation by empowering the British economy, addressing inequalities, spending on infrastructure and taking the nation which spearheaded the industrial revolution to the 21st century.

In his first public statements in office, he did exactly that, declaring initiatives to fix the National Health Service and upgrade public infrastructure.

This is where the Chinese wallet becomes important and Johnson knows it. In the first days in office, he made a strong public overture towards China, declaring the great economic and cultural bonds between the two nations.

Meanwhile, Washington has drastically shifted into realpolitik mode. Amid record levels of political division and partisanship, American political elites – Democrats and Republicans alike – agree on one thing only: that China is a threat which has to be contained.

When America fights wars, it poses a single laconic question to its allies: Are you with us or against us? It was that question in 2003 that British prime minister Tony Blair answered by supporting the catastrophic Iraq war. Yet the trade offs back then were easy to measure. Today, China has entered the strategic equation and drastically altered the fundamentals. The coming strategic dilemma will be pressing for Britain.

Be realistic on Brexit and US-China trade war, or risk massive fallout

If Johnson follows an open policy towards China, allowing Chinese technology companies to build core British infrastructure to tempt Beijing into investing, he would sever relations with the US. Without strong US support, Britain would have limited leverage to negotiate with the EU and function in a post-Brexit world.

On the other hand, restrictions on Chinese technology companies would make the Chinese less willing to invest, let alone open their vast market to British products and services. In a devastating blow for London, China could pick Frankfurt or Paris for its yuan financial centre.

As the US-China rivalry becomes more cutthroat, Johnson’s strategic flexibility will plummet. His space for manoeuvre will shrink and “macro-managing the affairs of a microstate” with the world’s two sole superpowers necessitates gyroscopic strategic thinking. Soon, Johnson will have to pick friends and update Britain’s grand strategy for the 21st century.

Vasilis Trigkas is an Onassis Scholar and research fellow in the Belt & Road Strategy Centre at Tsinghua University

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