While others are focusing on the gender make-up of the incoming Biden Administration appointees, the imperialists at the British Empire’s Royal Institute for International Affairs/Chatham House have been looking over the horizon, at how they can — in the post-Trump, post Brexit era — resume their presumed rightful place as master rulers of the universe. That would be the significance of a new Chatham House report issued Jan. 11.
In “Global Britain, Global Broker: A Blueprint for the U.K.’s Future International Role,” Chatham House Director Sir Robin Niblett, CMG, is implicitly arguing that Britain no longer has to do an “Asian pivot,” as was argued back in Nov. 22, 2020, in the report “A Very British Tilt: Towards a New U.K. Strategy in the Indo-Pacific Region” by the Policy Exchange’s Indo-Pacific Commission. That report argued for the Empire to shift to an Indo-Pacific (anti-China) centered diplomacy — even to dispatching the HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier to the Indo-Pacific — and away from a trans-Atlantic one. The operation to oust U.S. President Donald Trump having succeeded, however, means that it can focus on other things.
In his introductory page, Niblett writes that “rather than reincarnate itself as a miniature great power, he [Sir Robin] argues that the country has the chance to remain internationally influential if it serves as the broker of solutions to global challenges” in areas such as Climate Change, “international peace and security,” and “global tax transparency.” To accomplish these goals, “the U.K. will need to invest in and leverage its unique combination of diplomatic reach, diverse security capabilities and prominence in international development.”
