Earlier this month, the Conservative Party put out a tweet celebrating the fact that (according to Brand Finance’s Global Soft Power Index 2024!), the United Kingdom is “the second most powerful country in the world”. The United States took the top spot, of course. Third-placed was China.
This social media masterpiece was swiftly deleted. Probably sensible: notwithstanding the tragedy of the Government latching on to a publicity stunt by a consultancy, the claim was a joke. And that was before a Conservative MP and former minister was detained and deported by Djibouti:
“[Tim] Loughton arrived in Djibouti on April 8 for a 24-hour visit including meeting the British ambassador, but was detained for more than seven hours at the airport, barred entry to the country and told he was being removed on the next available flight.”
According to the Daily Telegraph, he “believes his unprecedented and “intimidating” detention and expulsion by the Djibouti authorities was a “direct consequence” of his criticism of the Chinese regime.” Yet they were only third on Brand Finance’s list! Someone should tell them.
It’s hard to think of a more on-the-nose rebuke to current pretensions about the UK’s global position than getting such treatment from Djibouti, a nation of just over a million people with a total territory of about 23km2.
It’s another taste of what a genuinely multipolar world might look like, and ought to be a shot across the bows of our foreign policy establishment. Consider what Beijing has done to secure this sort of influence in this (and many other) African nations:
“Djibouti, Africa’s smallest nation, has received billions of dollars of investment from China, including a new stadium, hospital and $1 billion (£791 million) space port. China has built a naval base in the country, stationed 2,000 troops there and holds more than $1.4 billion of Djibouti’s debt, 45 per cent of its GDP.”
Unfortunately, however, said establishment remains as wedded as ever to a very different approach. This was spelled out very clearly in a recent report from UCL Policy Lab, which Peter Franklin cast a caustic eye over in his column a couple of weeks ago.
To that we can add the view of Simon McDonald, the former head of the Foreign Office, that Britain should not “make an enemy of China”. Amongst the steps he recommended in his recent book (perhaps with pleasing Beijing in mind) were scrapping the UK’s nuclear deterrent and ceding our seat on the UN Security Council to the European Union.
It calls to mind a line from Yes, Prime Minister, when Jim Hacker contrived to save a small Commonwealth country from communist invasion despite the best efforts of his officials: “But if he’d listened to the Foreign Office it would have been impossible!”
Looking further back, it has been decades since New Labour strove to completely divorce British aid spending from our harder foreign policy objectives; what Chris Mullin summed up in his diaries as “No more Pergau Dams“. This mindset has reportedly resisted whatever efforts to change it have been made during the past 14 years, with the ‘abolition’ of the Department for International Development merely seeing it, and its approach, rolled into the Foreign Office.
All of which is to say that it has been decades, at least, since this country seems to have taken seriously the proper maintenance of its hard power, a problem of which an unserious approach to defence spending is only part.
Soft power isn’t entirely fake. Cultural exports, for example, can and do have real impact. There are also cases where nations can draw on historic relationships to punch well above their weight, such as the special relationship Ireland has (and Britain, despite the fervent wishes of its politicians, does not have) with the United States.
But for any country that aspires to more from its foreign policy than being a tax haven with good branding, soft power is not enough. Most of the sort of soft power that really matters when it comes to combating Chinese (and Russian, and Iranian) influence overseas grows out of hard power. It can augment it, but it cannot replace it.
Giving away the remaining pillars of British hard power and hoping the world thanks us for it, as so many academics and ex-mandarins seem to favour, is a fool’s errand. The real merits of such a strategy (such as they are) are that it spares us the need to make the hard decisions about resources and foreign policy the application of hard power involves, and would allow the UK to retreat into the diplomacy of gesture by divesting ourselves of the means for action.
Perhaps, if we were quiet enough, our Members of Parliament would once again be able to travel to Chinese-allied nations without fear of harassment. Presumably that would be good enough for McDonald.
The post Soft power latest: British Member of Parliament detained and deported from Djibouti appeared first on Conservative Home.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Henry Hill
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, http://www.conservativehome.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.