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Britain does not want a new Cold War – but we have to be ready for one

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Britain wants “no new Cold War on China”, said Boris Johnson on Tuesday. He was launching the Government’s Integrated Review of Britain’s defence and security. On Thursday, in Anchorage, Alaska, the first top-level meeting took place between Joe Biden’s new administration and the Chinese government. Each side insulted the other, the Chinese negotiator turning his allotted two minutes into a 15-minute diatribe. I checked the temperature in Anchorage on my mobile phone. “Minus 8C,” it said, “feels like minus 16C.” Feels pretty much like a Cold War to me.Criticising people for wanting a Cold War sets up a straw man. When the original one between the West and the Soviet Union began more than 70 years ago, few said, “Let’s have a Cold War”. Almost everyone hoped for better things. But it happened. It reflected, unfortunately, the reality. An aggressive totalitarian power threatened the interests and way of life of Western democracy. (Or, if you fancy reversing the case, capitalist imperialism threatened Karl Marx’s otherwise inevitable dictatorship of the proletariat.) Conflict was unavoidable.This has long been happening in relation to China. From 2013, when Xi Jinping began his Belt and Road Initiative, China has been publicly building a global imperial system through economic power. The West barely noticed. David Cameron’s Strategic Defence and Security Review in November 2015 appeared just after President Xi had been received with oily flattery on his state visit to Britain. The review sought “to build a deeper partnership with China, working more closely to address global challenges”. It did not recognise that the biggest global challenge was China.An Anglo-Chinese “high-level security dialogue” would help stamp out “cyber-enabled commercial espionage”, the 2015 review continued, as if China were not the greatest offender. The more China could take part in international institutions the better, it said. Yet China had already entered the WTO on false pretences, and suborned the World Health Organisation. Britain had the “ambition”, declared the Government, that China become our “second biggest export destination within the next decade”. The so-called Golden Era ensued, leading, among other things, to the corruption of our universities by Chinese money and influence.This was not a freak policy of Dave and George. Even after China’s growing regional military aggression, attacks on freedom in Hong Kong, persecution of the Uighurs, cyber-spying and theft of intellectual property, Britain still faced the wrong way. As recently as early last year, the then US secretary of state Mike Pompeo came here to urge Britain to purge Huawei from its 5G networks. Boris gave him a dusty answer. Only after China had incubated and accidentally released the Covid plague, spreading death across the world, did our Government finally change its mind.It is in this light, and that of Brexit, that the Integrated Review should be seen. So far, public comment – perhaps expecting hyper-Brexity braggadocio which did not come – has not grasped the difference a year has made. Two clues lie in the review’s title, Global Britain in a Competitive Age.The word “global” indicates that, post-Brexit, we are not tied into the EU power bloc and that threats, opportunities and communications stretch right round the world. Our region has become less significant.The word “competitive” suggests movement, change and a consciousness of threat. For the first time since the post-1945 settlement, Britain is not a status quo power – which, so long as it stayed in the EU, it was bound to be. It is now a country seeking, with allies, to readjust a world that has gone wrong.This sense of change is reflected in the genesis of the document. As never before in such matters, the key ideas have come from outside the mandarinate. (Not for nothing does the senior echelon of Whitehall take its nickname from the able but stifling Chinese imperial bureaucracy.) John Bew, the document’s chief author, is Boris’s chief foreign policy adviser, a distinguished, youngish historian and the biographer of Clement Attlee. On top of his academic work, he was also head of foreign policy at the think tank Policy Exchange. Last year, it produced a report, A Very British Tilt, under the chairmanship of the former Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, and supported by the ex-Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe. Its subtitle “Towards a new UK strategy in the Indo-Pacific” indicates the thinking which the Integrated Review now turns into government policy.When I began reading the Integrated Review, I felt dissatisfied with Boris Johnson’s own contribution. Neither the foreword nor the ensuing section called “The Prime Minister’s vision for the UK in 2030” mentions China. As mayor of London, Boris was one of many ready to receive Chinese investment in public projects and other business uncritically. He may feel shifty about this. He is certainly uncomfortable attacking a nation which he regards as an ancient and great civilisation. (It is indeed so, but surely that makes the Chinese Communist Party’s claim to embody that civilisation the more offensive.)There may be some method in the Prime Minister’s restraint, however. Being rude about China is not much use: the point is to be tough. In his statement on the Integrated Review to Parliament, Boris did say that we need to “relearn the art of competing against states with opposing values”. In an echo of the 1930s, designed to range the Government against Neville Chamberlain-style appeasers, he said there are “no faraway countries of which we know little”. He is allowing new thoughts to emerge without explicitly voicing them himself.On its inside pages, the review develops China doctrines which are the opposite of the Cameron/Osborne ones. China presents a “systemic challenge … to our security, prosperity and values – and to those of our allies and partners”. The UK is, for China, “a priority target across multiple spheres”, including space, cyber-space, tech and disinformation. China’s competition in the world is “the most significant geopolitical factor of the 2020s”. And it’s going the wrong way: China’s “15-year decline in democracy and pluralism will continue to 2030, accelerated by Covid-19”. The risk, and the stakes, are at last recognised as high. As one serving general puts the Cold War comparison to me: “Taiwan could become the Berlin of our day.”Even on trade with China, which the review hopes will prosper, it warns against “practices that have an adverse effect on prosperity and security”. It is conscious, though it does not state, that wormed its way into our systems because the West had allowed itself to be out-competed on telecoms.Much more than past British defence and security documents, this one tries to practice economic statecraft. Instead of grabbing money wherever it can be found, the Government should strengthen the relationship between security and prosperity. There will be more of this inout next week. The puts unprecedented emphasis on science and technology – the only area about which, in reference to Britain, it employs that over-used word “world-class”. China is a master of civil/military fusion. Britain, with its allies, must develop the free-world equivalent, it says.Anything worthy of the name of strategy needs to offer what defence jargon calls a “net assessment” – an account of the totality of power and a theory of how to win. For the first time in a long time, a British Government is starting to join up the dots so that can start to see the shape of the future.Related TopicsThe Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our.You need to be a subscriber to join the conversation. Find out more.Show commentsAdvertisementRelated TopicsWe rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism.We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future.Thank you for your support.Need help?Visit ourpage.Close

Britain wants “no new Cold War on China”, said Boris Johnson on Tuesday. He was launching the Government’s Integrated Review of Britain’s defence and security. On Thursday, in Anchorage, Alaska, the first top-level meeting took place between Joe Biden’s new administration and the Chinese government. Each side insulted the other, the Chinese negotiator turning his allotted two minutes into a 15-minute diatribe. I checked the temperature in Anchorage on my mobile phone. “Minus 8C,” it said, “feels like minus 16C.” Feels pretty much like a Cold War to me.Criticising people for wanting a Cold...

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Charles Moore

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Britain does not want a new Cold War – but we have to be ready for one

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