In June 2024, in anticipation of a long-awaited defence review, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change published its vision for Reimagining Defence and Security: New Capabilities for New Challenges, advocating for a new, more holistic approach to the United Kingdom’s defence and security strategy driven by a National Security Team. Central to securing the UK’s capability would be a comprehensive review of the state of the UK’s alliances and revisiting how to consolidate these crucial relationships.
The Labour government has now concluded the Strategic Defence Review process – alongside the foreign secretary commissioning three strategic reviews to examine the UK’s global impacts, a joint integrated development diplomacy model and economic capability in diplomacy, as well as a Defence Industrial Strategy consultation to be concluded in 2025. It is imperative that as part of these it includes clear policy that strengthens its strategic assets abroad to better enable its vision for the UK’s place in the world.
Between the controversial proposed return of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, which could threaten the operational flexibility of the US-UK military base on Diego Garcia, to Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s visit to the UK’s Royal Air Force presence in Cyprus in December 2024, it does not seem that the UK has seized fully the opportunity to consider the value of these relationships more holistically. At the same time, some of these relationships run the risk of being eroded as other countries supersede their presence.
In the recently launched Foreign Affairs Committee inquiry into the UK’s soft-power strategy, Committee Chair Dame Emily Thornberry has highlighted the challenge of meeting China, Russia and India’s growing investment into diplomatic, educational and cultural exchanges, and the need to align soft power to foreign-policy strategy. The long arm of investment by these actors, as well as the US, risks causing the UK not only to lose opportunities to consolidate its influence, but also to render its strategic assets dependent on these other countries’ physical and cultural investment.
To counter this, the UK urgently needs to reframe its understanding of its bases abroad as agents of soft power beyond operational military activities, whether by facilitating cultural and educational institutions or investing in communications infrastructure of mutual value to the host country and the UK local interests, such as the relationship between Safaricom and Vodacom and Vodafone in Kenya. This also needs to be seen in the context of a broader view of the UK’s long-term strategic needs – from securing supply chains of critical minerals to building new export markets.
However, in order to determine the projected value of the UK’s soft-power initiatives and build a prioritisation framework that will create maximum return on these investments, a survey of the current state of influence surrounding UK strategic assets is required. To this end, TBI partnered with the Adarga Research Institute to identify the threats to current UK strategic assets and the key levers for opportunity and growth. Using an adapted version of Adarga’s Country Influence Index, we worked together to provide an initial analysis of the UK’s current presence in Brunei, Oman and Kenya as a means to catalyse some of the practical recommendations from our report on reimagining defence and create the model for policymakers to have continued oversight of the UK’s soft power and influence.
Read the full paper from Adarga Research Institute and TBI here.