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The best national security that (no) money can buy? by Ian Bond
The UK’s ‘Integrated Review refresh’ is more sober than its 2021 precursor. But the gap between the challenges the UK faces and the resources available to meet them has grown. On March 13th, the British government published its ‘Integrated Review refresh 2023’ or ‘IR23’, an update of the 2021 ‘Integrated Review of security, defence, development and foreign policy’ (IR21). The ‘integration’ does not include the Treasury, however: it has not allocated the money needed to meet the challenges identified. IR21 stated correctly that Russia would remain the most acute direct threat to the UK, and foresaw that the decade ahead would be marked by growing conflict and instability, but it did not predict that within a year Russian President Vladimir Putin would launch a full-scale attack on Ukraine. IR23 attempts to take account both of the impact of the war on the UK’s security, and of China’s increasingly unsettling behaviour on the world stage. On the whole, the new document is an improvement. It ditches some of the bombast characteristic of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, including references to ‘Global Britain’, though it still makes the questionable assertion that the UK has “a uniquely diverse range of national strengths”. IR23 no longer claims that the UK will be a “science and tech superpower” by 2030 (although the phrase still appears in other government statements); and it drops the ambition to be “the European partner with the broadest, most integrated presence” in
the Indo-Pacific region. The aim in science and technology now is to “keep pace with strategic competitors” – still ambitious, given low UK research and development spending; in the Indo-Pacific region, the UK will be “working with others and ensuring that we are respectful to and guided by regional perspectives”. Following the Franco-British summit just before the publication of IR23, there is a reference to co-operation with France in the Indo-Pacific, including “establishing the basis of a permanent European maritime presence in the region through co-ordinated carrier deployments”. Then French defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian made a similar proposal for co-ordinated European naval patrols in the South China Sea in 2016, before Brexit. IR23 is also warmer in its language on the EU. Johnson and his ministers and advisers tried to avoid dealing with the EU institutions on foreign, security and defence policy, and rejected the idea of including these issues in the UK’s agreement on post-withdrawal relations with the EU. By contrast, IR23 speaks of entering “a new phase in our post-Brexit relationships in Europe”, after the Windsor Framework resolved the dispute between Brussels and London over the Northern Ireland Protocol, and includes the EU (as an institution) among the UK’s “European allies and partners”. It also speaks of developing