The British government may to release its Defense Review on March 16, which is expected to reveal Britain tilting to the Indo-Pacific region, especially to counter China. The Guardian has a long article by Patrick Wintour, its diplomatic editor, on the review, raising whether the tilt is a case of imperial fantasy. He observes that British aircraft carriers are still not equipped with British squadrons but a squadron of F-35s from the U.S. Marine Corps.
Wintour writes that some will claim the tilt east of Suez is a “rebalancing"; others will warn that Prime Minister Boris Johnson “is indulging a hubristic and militarily dangerous imperial fantasy.” He quotes Rory Medcalf, head of the National Security College at Australian National University as saying, “The unspoken but understood purpose of Indo-Pacific as a foreign policy concept is for the maritime democracies to counter China and uphold the law of the sea. The Indo-Pacific is a rallying call, a code for diluting and absorbing the power of Chinese power.”
While Wintour quotes a few other anti-Chinese talking heads, he also cites Prof. Anatol Lieven, King’s College London, and fellow at the New America Foundation, who warns that .
by “signing up to a U.S. and largely military-led containment of China,” Britain risks making a “strategic mistake on a par with the Iraq war in 2003....” And Boris Johnson’s brother Jo Johnson, the former universities minister, says he is appalled by the talk of confrontation with China or economic decoupling. “The reality is that if we follow a hard Brexit with Chexit, then global Britain is going to be an aeroplane that has dropped both engines.”
Jo Johnson’s conclusion is notable: “It would be economic madness to decouple from China and incredibly destructive of this idea of global Britain, because there are many countries … across the global south who are increasingly interdependent with China. There won’t be a global Britain if we are not engaging with China, and all the other countries enmeshed with it.”
Nonetheless, at the Munich Security Conference, Boris Johnson did say Britain was now looking east, and claimed the need to send a stern message to China.
