The international order that shaped British foreign policy after the Cold War is fracturing along three by now familiar lines. The first is the return of great power competition between the United States (US) and China, alongside the rise of a range of significant new global middle powers. The second is the related decline of the old liberal international order, built and underwritten by the US since 1945. With this decline comes the weakening of many of the old multilateral institutions this system created, as major powers pursue narrower and more transactional interests. The third is the weaponisation of economic and political interdependence in what remains a still remarkably global world, meaning that interconnecting systems of trade, finance, technology and data can be used as instruments of state coercion. 

This is a challenging position for the UK. Britain occupied a privileged place within the old order, both as a major power in its own right and as Washington's closest partner. It prospered accordingly. That old advantage is now a source of considerable confusion, as a once fortunate position unravels, leaving doubts about the nature of British power in a coercive world. The UK needs to work out a new way of responding to this changed world, rather than just adapting the assumptions of the old order at the margins. That response has to rest on a clear understanding both of how the world is changing and of Britain's own priorities within it. In practice, this means earning Britain's place through focus and demonstrated national power and capability. 

This is no cause for pessimism. It is far from a uniquely British predicament; indeed, it is a problem common to almost every middle power operating in this new environment. Peers from Australia and Canada to Japan and South Korea are all navigating the same structural shift, as are our neighbours in Europe. Britain's anxieties about the reality of relative decline should be read in that comparative light, rather than as a symptom of some kind of self-lacerating national exceptionalism. It is also by no means obvious that the UK is worse equipped than other middle powers to manage this complex moment, given its powerful economy, strong institutional relationships, independent nuclear deterrent, global financial centre and extensive diplomatic network. 

Instead, this short essay argues that Britain can sustain influence in this new coercive world, provided it is honest about its position and deliberate about where it chooses to act. That means moving away from the instinct to preserve an all-domain global role that Britain can no longer properly resource, and towards a much more selective foreign policy based on a narrower conception of national interest, with a clearer focus on national and economic security. This in turn means understanding the nature of Britain's relative power decline and the strategic choices it faces between the US, Europe, China, and the rest of the world. It means concentrating resources on a smaller number of problems and working more closely with fewer, select high-capacity partners. It also requires closing the institutional divide between defence and diplomacy, and investing in new forms of technologically enhanced statecraft.

Rather than continuing to plan as though the assumptions of the 1990s and 2000s still hold, Britain’s new approach must begin by recognising that its voice in world affairs is declining in relative terms, even if absolute capacity remains substantial. Part of this challenge is self-inflicted. Britain’s departure from the European Union in particular reduced its voice on the world stage. These frayed ties with its neighbours come at the very moment when collective European weight, in a more dangerous world, is more valuable. Decades of austerity and underinvestment have left the armed forces hollowed out, with shrinking force numbers and outdated structures unfit for the challenges they are likely to face. 

At the same time, shrinking budgets and repeated organisational upheaval, including the merger with the Department for International Development, has left the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) as a shrunken and institutionally traumatised machine for conducting statecraft. However, as Ed Miliband takes over as foreign secretary this only strengthens the case for a clearer strategy of prioritisation, and one that consciously links ends and means. International relations scholars often dress this idea up as ‘grand strategy’, but stripped of its pretension it boils down to nothing more than the discipline of matching national ambitions to capabilities; to have a plan that matches your means. 

Not all of this is unique to Britain, but it does leave the UK facing major challenges about how to rebuild. As Prime Minister Andy Burnham put it recently, “in response to the evolving threats we face, and as we meet our NATO commitments, it is right that we rebuild our hard power for a new era that is very different.” This is correct. The urgent need to rebuild traditional hard power, as well as investing in other underlying technological-industrial sources of national power, should by now be widely accepted, even by those who were previously sceptical of higher defence spending. 

Even so, the UK faces an undeniably complex set of new trade-offs that weigh this international rebuilding process against the spending priorities that sustain domestic public services. These guns/butter trade-offs are especially complex for a Labour government, whose political instincts and electoral coalition remain deeply committed to the latter. It also speaks to a new era in which foreign policy is more closely bound up with rebuilding national defence than it was when Britain could sit comfortably under the American security umbrella. 

However, the broader challenge Britain faces is not simply that its own influence is declining in absolute terms. In the future, defence spending should and will rise and diplomatic capacity can, in time, be rebuilt. The harder problem is that the wider western club to which Britain has anchored its influence is itself shrinking, in both relative power and influence, as the balance of the international system shifts towards a more contested set of poles. Therefore, Britain's changed standing is inseparable from the reach of the grouping through which it has long acted. 

Some of the international institutions in which Britain wielded power, and the global issues on which it has led, are simply receding in importance as the international system reorganises itself. The European Union is embattled. Previously western-led institutions like the G7 and G20 are less effective. “The UN is in decline, the Commonwealth is in decline. The UK’s genuine leadership role and commitment on climate is less valuable than before,” as Ben Judah, a former foreign office adviser, put it recently. “We are also losing influence because the west is losing influence. The western alliance is fragmenting, as the Chinese authoritarian axis is deepening.” 

This change also reflects the relative change in influence of other members of the western club, the group of richer democracies with whom Britain has traditionally felt most comfortable acting internationally. But it is compounded by the rise of a broader cadre of increasingly capable global middle powers outside the West, who are taking on more significant leadership roles within their regions, and who no longer defer to a western-led consensus. 

The paradox remains that this western club will in many ways become more important diplomatically to the UK, not less, given the need to develop partnerships to solve pressing security challenges. Even as this once dominant group declines, a sensible strategy will still involve deepening cooperation with this shrinking pool of core western and western-aligned powers. A world in which the US is less reliable will mean more focus on those who are. In Asia, for instance, that means concentrating more on nations in the ‘global west’ alongside select others, such as India and Singapore, whose weight or influence make them disproportionately valuable. In the future, Japan is still going to be a more important partner for the UK than Malaysia, while Australia will remain more important than Indonesia. More generally, the sensible response to this paradox is to identify which parts of the existing architecture are defensible, and where they are not, to redirect Britain's diplomatic capital to attempting to build new structures and coalitions to secure national and economic security instead.

Foreign policy is a question of where to place scarce resources and which partners to build a country's strategy around. Britain's changed position between Washington, Brussels and Beijing sits at the centre of that question. Ultimately, the UK needs to work out its new position in the world relative to these major poles, in what one senior UK official dubs “the three-body problem” of future British diplomacy. 

In a recent paper, Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, sketched out three broad options for Britain’s future direction. The first involved a renewed attachment to the US, despite its changed role in the world under President Donald Trump, on the grounds that Britain has no credible near-term alternative as its core security guarantor. The second, which Leonard dubbed “Global Britain 2.0”, involved a more diversified and multi-regional strategy, with a focus on middle powers in Asia, the Gulf and the Commonwealth. This aligned Britain with other mid-sized democracies seeking to preserve parts of the rules-based order under pressure from both China and the US. This approach of diversification and hedging is also by now associated with the ideas that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney set out in early 2026, when he spoke of middle power cooperation as a response to the Trump-linked rupture in the established international order. 

The third model, which Leonard dubs a “pivot to Europe”, would anchor Britain more firmly in a changing European security and economic ecosystem, even without necessarily rejoining the European Union itself, at least not for now. Leonard argues for this third model, and there is a strong analytical case for that conclusion, given Europe's proximity, market size and shared exposure to Russian aggression. In the aftermath of the war in Ukraine, Europe has become a more geopolitical and hard-nosed security actor, willing to use its collective fiscal weight to fund military renewal in ways that would once have been unthinkable. It has also shown a new readiness to use its economic and regulatory power more assertively, treating trade, sanctions and technology policy as instruments of hard security. Rebuilding ties with Europe should sit at the heart of any future UK strategy, not merely given its core security interests in Ukraine but in order to manage longer-term regional challenges, from Russia aggression to irregular migration. 

In practice, however, Britain is unlikely to shift decisively towards any single one of these models. Whatever else happens, the UK will need to manage and sustain relations with Washington, which remains a vital source of hard security support, especially over Ukraine, as well as of critical technological capability. There is much talk of achieving greater autonomy and de-risking from the US. This is sensible to some degree: the UK should be developing sovereign assets in vital areas and it should seek to avoid excessive reliance on any one partner in areas with critical vulnerabilities. But this must be tempered with realism. It is an irony of the current moment that UK reliance on the US has generally increased, even as the US itself has become less reliable under Trump. This is true technologically, where American artificial intelligence systems will be ever-more vital to UK competitiveness. It is also true in areas like energy, where dependence on American gas supplies has grown following the Iran war. “Allies are seeking to de-risk from the US in key domains through new middle power coalitions,” as former US diplomats Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi put it recently. “But the shift towards de-risking is being off-set and ultimately outweighed by larger megatrends.” 

Britain’s three body problem should also be viewed in terms of international threats, many of which emanate from the new axis between China and Russia. China’s core military support for Russia in Ukraine is materially changing Europe’s balance of power. Its new economic model, complete with gigantic industrial capacity, is a direct challenge to the prosperity of advanced western economies. This second threat receives worryingly little attention in the UK, at least compared to Brussels and continental European nations, given unrealistic assumptions that Britain’s relatively smaller manufacturing sector will offer a form of protection. 

In all this it is important not to be naive about China's role as a potential future partner for Britain. Over recent years the UK has succeeded in normalising ties with Beijing - a positive achievement after a period of strain and an important development at a time of changing ties with a more transactional US. In the future, limited cooperation might be possible in a few areas, like climate technology. But Beijing's longer-term aim remains to unpick much of what remains of the existing international order, presenting obvious challenges to UK economic and national security. Instead, the UK should seek to deepen ties with the rising powers of Asia, most obviously the ‘big four’ of Australia, India, Japan, and South Korea, all of whom share similar threat perceptions with respect to Beijing.  

What matters more than settling definitively on one model is recognising the underlying discipline that should run through all three tracks. Britain's hope of shaping international outcomes lies in husbanding scarce resources and concentrating them where they can have more effect. Western powers like the UK seek to save as much of the existing order as they can. Elsewhere, they should seek to build new structures that might replace some of what has been lost, especially in emerging areas like the regulation of AI or biological security. Beyond dealing with the big three poles, it is natural in this situation to think about diversification towards a wider range of emerging powers. The challenge is that most developing economies do not have advanced capabilities or the capacity to develop new international structures, especially at the global level. Many also do not want to. Even superpowers in the making like India are often extractive with international partners, mostly seeking investment and technology transfer. New Delhi has little interest in helping to buttress the old western-led system, and is highly selective in the international areas in which it is willing to spend diplomatic capital. 

Instead, for the UK, this means focusing more effort on a smaller range of high-capacity powers with clear overlapping interests. As discussed, most of these will come via deeper ties with existing western and western-aligned partners in Asia, Europe, and North America. But it will also involve a focus on other technologically-advanced and internationally-minded nations, from Singapore and the UAE to Israel and Chile. There were plenty of critics of former Foreign Secretary David Lammy's idea of ‘progressive realism’. Even so, one of its more realistic tenets was that the UK should work closely with regional actors like Saudi Arabia or Qatar, even if their regimes made many in the Labour party squeamish. 

In this new world, new partnerships will just as often be bilateral or ‘minilateral’ - bringing together small, purpose-built groups around a specific problem - as they will be the sprawling multilateralism of old, where large standing institutions attempted to bind together dozens of states with loosely-aligned interests. The UK has done positive work in these areas, recently developing enhanced partnerships with Asian nations like Japan and South Korea, as well as with Germany and France in Europe. Membership of the US-led Pax Silica minilateral grouping is another good example, bringing together the world's leading technology powers to coordinate on semiconductor supply chains, export controls and advanced computing, giving Britain a seat at a table where the rules of the technological order are actually being written. A foreign policy built around specialisation and making a smaller number of bigger bets with high-capacity partners, is more likely to succeed than one built around comprehensive but shallow commitments. 

This all sounds sensible and self-evident. Indeed, in many ways it is already UK policy. The 2023 Integrated Review talked about cooperation with a select group of so-called ‘middle-ground’ powers in the developing world. The 2025 National Security Strategy suggested the UK should “sharpen our diplomatic focus on countries that are geographically dispersed but economically vibrant and technologically advanced ... who are interested in cooperation on trade and security”. But in practice this focused approach has largely failed, given the gravity and internal political economy of British diplomacy. There is an obvious political appeal to talk of engaging broadly with the Global South, even if the rewards are few. Powerful domestic political constituencies argue in favour of particular national causes, from international development in general to specific diaspora communities. The result remains scattered attention and a plethora of low-impact projects that drain attention from more critical threats and resources from high-calibre and high-impact partnerships.

The greatest danger facing British foreign policy is business as usual: the assumption that tweaks and adjustments to existing habits will be sufficient to manage a changed environment. Before leaving office, the former Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper published a long essay for Chatham House, which included a good deal of conventional thinking. It argued for greater multilateral cooperation on issues such as climate change and artificial intelligence, alongside doing more with European partners. This was fine as far as it went; none of these individual goals are wrong in themselves. But the essay did little to grapple with the hard choices required about where to spend increasingly limited geopolitical capital. A more sensible approach is to focus more carefully on national interest and capabilities, rather than treating every worthy multilateral goal as equally deserving of scarce diplomatic attention. 

To take one tough recent example, under Prime Minister Keir Starmer the UK radically cut its foreign aid spending, a once unthinkable decision. In the old world, Britain argued that generous international aid was itself a core interest, bound up with its values and systems of influence. But when push came to shove that turned out not to be true. Instead, renewal of national defence rightly took precedence. That choice was largely forced on the government by circumstance and a strained fiscal position, rather than chosen by deliberate strategy. The question is the extent to which choices of this kind can be made as a function of strategic priorities, rather than extracted piecemeal, under budgetary and political pressure. 

Part of the answer lies in focusing more clearly on how Britain defines and then leverages its own national interests, in a world where the old moorings of Brussels and Washington no longer offer fixed references. This is far from impossible: over the past decade the UK made a halting attempt to build a practice of national strategy-making, led from Downing Street by the historian John Bew. The resulting Integrated Review strategies were a helpful, if not always perfect, attempt to focus national policy-making around a clearer set of goals. These included, for instance, placing extra emphasis on the Indo-Pacific and developing assets in particular areas of science and technology. 

That said, this faltering revival in the art of national statecraft remains in its infancy. Much of Britain’s foreign policy establishment remains instinctively wedded to the world as it was. Many other global middle powers, never having enjoyed Britain's privileged position in the old order, have a clearer sense of their own interests, shaped by the hard limits of natural resources or geography. As a result they develop sharper understanding of their own limitations and greater willingness to concentrate on narrower core objectives in their own regions. In practice all this points towards a need to concentrate scarce resources, in both defence and diplomacy, rather than spreading them thinly across a comprehensive but shallow set of commitments. It also means regional discipline, with primary focus on European security, and secondary on the Indo-Pacific and the Middle East, even if that means less focus on other parts of the world.  

One way to sharpen this strategy is to anchor it more directly in questions of core security, meaning military, economic and industrial security. In a world of intensifying weaponisation and coercion, this means identifying vulnerabilities and finding practical ways to mitigate them. This points towards partnerships that reduce dependency. Reducing exposure on critical raw materials, for instance, means cooperation with producers such as Australia and Canada, funders such as Japan and South Korea, processors such as Malaysia, and with the US itself, which remains the leading power capable of creating a new ecosystem to balance China. 

To make such partnerships work, the UK needs greater precision about the threats it is trying to mitigate, what it wants from its core partners, and what it is prepared to offer in return. The IPPR recently made a similar case, arguing for greater focus on "chokepoints in a small number of 'core' domains that underpin long-term security and productive capacity", citing defence, energy and AI. This new world also means focusing on understanding where the UK and its partners hold genuine leverage of their own, rather than assuming Britain is only ever on the exposed side of technological interdependence. In a world where other powers are learning to identify and exploit chokepoints and asymmetric advantages, the UK needs to do the same. Many of its own most promising sources of leverage lie precisely in the technological domain. 

There are already some good examples of this more disciplined approach at work in recent British foreign policy. Under Rishi Sunak, the Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit briefly succeeded in setting the global agenda on artificial intelligence governance, precisely because it convened a small and carefully chosen group of nations, including China, rather than attempting a broad multilateral gathering. (It is worth recalling that at the time the Foreign Office objected to keeping the invite list small, for fear of causing offence to those not invited, underlining the challenges that often come with a narrower and more focused approach). In Asia, joining AUKUS and acceding to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership were both deliberate choices to embed Britain more deeply within a smaller circle of trusted partners, rather than spreading diplomatic effort thinly across the whole of the Indo-Pacific. In his first days in office, Ed Miliband travelled to Asia for meetings at the annual ASEAN summit, itself the legacy of earlier decisions to concentrate resources on Southeast Asia. 

Closely related to this focus on selectivity is the need to close the long-standing institutional divide between defence and foreign policy, since adversaries and partners alike increasingly treat diplomacy, deterrence and economic statecraft together, not as separate domains. Rising defence spending should be understood as a form of foreign-policy signalling to allies and adversaries alike, as well as investment in hard capability. Defence spending decisions need to be made with greater foreign-policy input, and vice-versa, rather than treated as a standalone process. An old division of labour, in which diplomats handled engagement and development while the military handled deterrence and warfighting, made sense in a relatively benign security environment, but is increasingly obsolete in a period defined by hybrid and grey-zone threats. 

Cable-cutting, cyber operations, disinformation campaigns and economic coercion by Russia and China also do not respect boundaries between departments. Responding to them requires fused intelligence, diplomatic and military decision-making. In the late 2010s, the National Security Adviser Mark Sedwill introduced what he called the “fusion doctrine”, an attempt to coordinate the government. In practice this meant bringing defence, diplomatic, intelligence and trade officials into the same planning process on an issue like countering Russian sabotage or Chinese economic coercion, rather than leaving each department to respond within its own silo and coordinate only after the fact. It is an approach that deserves to be revived. 

All of this requires a much stronger strategic centre to British foreign policymaking, built around Downing Street, the National Security Secretariat, and the new Office for the Prime Minister and Cabinet. For all the challenges faced by his government, Keir Starmer did enjoy some foreign policy successes, in part because of the widely-admired role played by Jonathan Powell as national security adviser. Even so, a small number of capable individuals is no replacement for strategic planning at the heart of government. As prime minister, Andy Burnham will find foreign policy just as demanding on his time. Ensuring a renewed strategic centre to British foreign policy with enhanced resources should be a priority for his new administration. Ties with the world’s three major powers in particular - China, Europe, and the US - should be driven from the centre of government, given all three represent pan-government challenges that can only sensibly be dealt with centrally.  

Elsewhere, there are significant opportunities to improve foreign policy, including a revival of an enhanced policy planning staff function in the Foreign Office, to develop medium-term strategy. One obvious further path lies in investing foreign policy technological capability, covering areas such as artificial intelligence governance, semiconductor supply chains, data flows and undersea cable security, rather than leaving this ground to other departments by default. Technological advancement is now a driver of international security, not a peripheral concern to be left to specialist agencies. It is also, in itself, a source of leverage, and the UK needs a far clearer understanding of where its own technological weaknesses lie if it is to avoid being on the receiving end of that leverage, rather than exercising it. 

Part of what makes this technological challenge distinctive is the sheer concentration of power now held by international tech platforms. To take one obvious example, if the UK sought to regulate a platform like X, this could plausibly complicate Ukrainian access to satellite connectivity, given Starlink's common ownership under Elon Musk. This direct link between technology-company dependencies and the European balance of power security is a genuinely new problem, and one for which Britain's foreign and security policy apparatus is not yet well equipped. Beginning to manage this problem will only be possible with leaders who understand these complex new linkages between technological and geopolitical power, and who can manage the trade-offs between them. 

A transformation is needed in the UK to understand the potential of new forms of technological statecraft, rather than treating it as an add-on to conventional diplomacy. FCDO has traditionally been far more comfortable focusing on areas like cyber, with established policy processes and plenty of diplomatic meetings in Geneva and New York, than in the rough-and-tumble new world of technological policymaking in areas like rare earths or semiconductors. Under President Biden, by contrast, the State Department reinvented itself for a new era of technological diplomacy, partly out of a fear that if it did not, the decisions that mattered would simply be made elsewhere in the US government. This involved developing new diplomatic approaches and capabilities, not just in traditional arenas such as cyber, but in newer and emerging domains from AI to biotechnology. For the UK, a similar approach will involve working more closely with close partners who share both the technological base and the strategic outlook to make such cooperation meaningful.

Ahead of a European security summit in London in 2025, Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk made a stark point about Europe's geopolitical dynamics. “It's striking but it's true,” he argued. “Right now, 500 million Europeans are begging 300 million Americans for protection from 140 million Russians who have been unable to overcome 50 million Ukrainians for three years.” Tusk's point was meant optimistically. European nations like the UK, working closely together, ought to be capable of managing the major regional security challenges they face from Russia, even with reduced American support. Certainly it is true that the strategic position of European nations like the UK compares favourably to Asian partners like Japan and South Korea, who are just as reliant on American support and face in China a far more challenging long term regional security actor. 

Britain should approach its own future in that same spirit of realistic optimism. As a global middle power it retains unusually advanced capabilities and strong historical relationships. The decades after the Cold War were unusually comfortable for Britain, meaning its new circumstances have been a shock. But the country coped well in earlier eras marked by intense great power competition, and without the comfort of a dominant and benign America underwriting its domestic security. The biggest risk for a country in Britain's position lies in pretending that it remains an all-weather power capable of doing a little bit of everything. Instead, a new kind of statecraft is needed for new circumstances, one that replaces comprehensive but shallow engagement with an approach that is focused, well-resourced and realistic, fit for more complex times.