Though we retain the potential and many of the assets necessary to operate as a global power, a number of the enablers that we depend upon to project and sustain that influence are being eroded away, if not deleted outright. At the heart of the problem is the fact that the UK does not possess a proper national strategy, and has not done so since at least 1989.
National strategy is what enables a country to have real direction and strength. National strategy seeks to further the national interest through the effective coordination of all instruments of power, be they economic, political, cultural, military or diplomatic. It is guided by a clear understanding of what the country stands for, what sort of power it wants to be in the world, and what it understands about the geopolitical environment in which it operates….
The government will claim it has a national strategy, the National Security Strategy (NSS) released in October 2010, but that does not constitute a real national strategy, and nor can it.
A national strategy for the UK:
1. Build a few decent aircraft carriers and needed support ships before the Argentinians get up the gumption to invade the Falklands again with Obama’s tacit permission.
This shouldn’t be hard.
Outside of China, who actually *has* a “National Strategy”???
#2–North Korea and Iran.
IMO one weakness in this analysis is that decline (to be meaningful) has to be defined relative to a reference point. No national strategy is going to return the UK to the international significance it had in 1900 or even 1939. One guesses, in the shorter term the UK’s ability to project influence is likely to remain more or less what it is now. In the longer term (say over the next fifty years) it’s likely to continue to slowly decline. The factors that ultimately explain such a decline are surely economic, demographic and geo-political. In other words it’s not simply true that “a national strategy is what enables a country to have real…strength”.