Two Visions of Greatness: Roleplay and Realpolitik in UK Strategic Posture

Abstract

How do states’ desires to perform an international-societal role interact with the imperative to safeguard their security in an anarchic international system? Using the case of the contemporary United Kingdom, this article explores the tensions between roleplay and realpolitik – gaining social recognition as a particular kind of state while doing what it takes to survive – through one key role conception, “Great Power”. Recent scholarship has dubbed Britain a “residual Great Power”: lacking the wherewithal to impose regional order through preponderance, it is still cast into the role of militarized international order-upholder by the allies whose support is necessary for such rolesustainment, America and France. Yet this role-based approach sets a different threshold on capability than the requirement to undertake survival-essential military missions, independent of potentially unreliable allies’ charity – realists’ understanding of “great power”. Theoretically, therefore, the article demonstrates that roleplay and realpolitik remain separate incentive structures underlying states’ foreign policy choices. Empirically, meanwhile, the article shows – through opportunity-cost force-posture analysis – that contemporary Britain is torn between the logics. Striving for independent self-protection capabilities, above-and-beyond the “residual power” criterion, London nonetheless makes a residual power’s implicit assumptions about alliance support in the deployment of those capabilities. 1 Author’s Note: I thank Stephane Baele, Joslyn Barnhart Trager, Gregorio Bettiza, Richard Foord, Andrej Krickovic, Patrick Porter, Carsten Schulz, Henning Tamm, Catarina Thomson, Kit Waterman, participants in the 2017 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, participants in the University of Exeter’s Centre for Advanced International Studies seminar series, the anonymous reviewers, and especially Helena Mills for invaluable comments on versions of this article. Two Visions of Greatness: Roleplay and Realpolitik in UK Strategic Posture 2 Nothing animates British foreign and defense policy elites like obsessing over their country’s “role” in the world, and the gnawing subtext, whether Britain is still “Great.” Dean Acheson’s oft-invoked 1962 barb to U.S. Military Academy cadets that “Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role” – front-page news in an outraged London (Brinkley 1990:601) – touched a nerve. The post-Cold War “unipolar moment” of U.S.-led Western dominance (Krauthammer 1990-91; Wohlforth 1999), with its “end-of-history” optimism and scope for UK leadership of humanitarian foreign-policy initiatives (Cook 1997; Blair 1999), provided a brief respite from the hand-wringing. But post-2001 embroilment in Washington’s flawed “Global War on Terror” alongside fiscal overstretch since the 2008-9 financial crisis has returned rolethemed soul-searching to Britain’s strategy-making community. The just-elected ConservativeLiberal coalition government’s 2010 National Security Strategy and accompanying Strategic Defence and Security Review (NSS/SDSR) – the official effort at squaring expansive global commitments with newly-straitened circumstances – began by asserting that national strategy must consider what “role” Britain wants to “play” in the world (HM Government 2010a:4). Policymakers and pundits invoke an allegedly “special” UK world role as a rationale for foreignpolicy decisions, while scholars utilize role-based analyses of Britain’s international position and strategic choices. With Britain’s exit from the European Union (“Brexit”) looming, British role concerns have also contributed to a major recent international-systemic shock (Blagden 2017:8-9) and will be prominent in public debate for the foreseeable future (Landale 2016; Nougayrède 2016). Indeed, Prime Minister Theresa May has felt compelled to explicitly reassert Britain’s “confident role” as a “global power” as Brexit unfolds (Giles and Martin 2017; The