Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Thursday 22nd April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con) [V]]

My Lords, your Lordships should be well pleased by one aspect of this review, because it reflects and draws on two seminal House of Lords reports, Persuasion and Power in the Modern World in 2014 and UK Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order in 2018, which urged policymakers and the then Foreign & Commonwealth Office to reappraise the UK’s position in a totally changed world landscape.

I welcome especially the review’s recommended tilt to Asia, including not just China but Japan, India and all the ASEAN counties, in terms of trade and security—a shift which some of us have been urging for decades, long before Brexit, to what is now by far the most vibrant region on the planet. The balanced approach to the tricky China containment issue, which has already been referred to, is also welcome, instead of some of the shotgun-like Sinophobia that has been served up to us from both sides of the Atlantic, which China simply brushes off. Almost every democracy, and almost certainly every Commonwealth member state, is looking for the right balance in dealing with the Chinese. Incidentally, I hope that New Zealand is not going wobbly on this need for developing a robust common approach.

The review is also good on recognising how technology has changed, the nature of warfare and defence—how, in the age of drones, cyber and artificial intelligence, troop power will have to be more skilled but with fewer numbers on the ground—and how soft power and smart power now play a central role in UK foreign policy in a networked and multipolar world, just as we urged seven years ago. The whole of society is now involved in a permanent kind of warfare, requiring entirely new kinds of defence, which some critics frankly do not yet seem to have grasped. Incidentally, I have to ask why the biggest modern soft power network of all, the modern Commonwealth, which the Minister has served so supremely well, gets so very little acknowledgement and no serious appraisal in this review until page 61.

Where the authors go wrong is in not understanding the full nature of the changed relationship with the United States. There is still far too much of a tone of the old followership with America, rather than partnership in the network age. The review seems far too influenced by US think tanks, with their dated obsession with great power dominance and rivalries. Power, trade and even dollar dominance are shifting away from the West, but not much of that seems to come through in the review at all.

Lastly, it has to be asked who on earth decided to put the lifting of the nuclear warhead cap, which goes flatly against NPT doctrine, in with the publication of this review. That inevitably distorted its public reception and its main messages. It really was a very unwise thing to do and spoiled a good, if belated, contribution to our reappraisal of Britain’s position in a transformed world order.