Make the World Safe Again

Imagining if UK foreign policy was all about resilience

Sam Freedman had a typically excellent piece a week ago on the consequences of the war in Iran for us here in the UK, and towards the end came this (emphasis added):

We do not yet know how long this crisis will last, but it is already serious enough to offer the government an opportunity to find a purpose it’s lacked so far. Starmer is not going to start making all-out attacks on Trump but he could use the consequences of America’s unwanted war to set out a coherent agenda focused on resilience.

The starting point would be to explain what’s happening now within the context of the past few decades: that rather than just another random shock it’s all part of an increasingly fragile world in which international institutions have come under attack. And that those attacking them are our enemies – at home and abroad (Mark Carney has shown you can make this argument while maintaining a relationship with Trump).

That means we need to focus more on security but also that a renewed drive for internationalism, with those countries that are still allies, has never been more important.

Totally agree. My friend and writing partner David Steven and I have been banging on about this agenda for nearly two decades now.

Last year, I got asked to write a note on exactly this for Keir Starmer’s foreign policy team at 10 Downing Street.

They were thinking that the government needed a new narrative on UK aid policy (no shit), I got put in touch with them as I used to be a special adviser on this stuff a million years ago, we had a chat, and then I wrote something up, basically saying “make it about resilience”.

This (lightly edited) is what I sent them.

1. The aid narrative and how it died

The development sector spent the last 25 years trying to put clear blue water between poverty reduction and everything else in foreign policy.

This worked great in the 2000s and achieved huge wins, both politically (the Gleneagles G8, the 0.7 target, the HIPC debt relief initiative) and in outcomes (astonishing breakthroughs on poverty, hunger, infant mortality, education, vaccines, HIV treatment, access to clean water, you name it).

But we steadily lost the public from 2010 onwards. This was partly due to the external context: austerity, cost of living, negative stories about migration or aid and corruption.

But it was also due to inherent problems with the narrative. We made it just about aid. We framed it as charity and saviourism. And in doing so we left the agenda vulnerable to a tougher economic climate and the rise of right wing populism.

So now we need a reboot — of the agenda, and of the narrative around it. What might that look like?

2. A new narrative for a dangerous world

Here’s a starting point: the public may not be evangelical about aid, but they do know these three things:

1. The world is dangerous right now — maybe more so than at any point since the end of the Cold War.

2. The issues we face are borderless, so the solutions need to be collective too.

3. There’s strength in numbers and we need coalitions and alliances like never before.

All of which means we need a new policy doctrine for an age of uncertainty, focused on managing global risks and building resilience to their impacts.

Because as an open society and economy, Britain is especially exposed to the hazards from this age of uncertainty and the ‘long crisis’ of globalisation.

Look at the last 20 years and how they show over and over again how global risks drive domestic impacts. Three examples (there are plenty more):

• How a global financial crisis and the ensuing sovereign debt crisis hit home in the form of austerity

• How state fragility and the Arab Spring hit home in the form of a refugee crisis and then Brexit

• How weak global public health systems hit home in the form of Covid and its consequences (polarisation, conspiracy theories, catastrophic impacts on public finances, etc.)

And the risks we face are proliferating, not diminishing: environmental (e.g. climate, accelerating species loss), economic (e.g. tariff shocks, the effect of AI on jobs), security (e.g. great power conflict risk, nuclear proliferation), or social (e.g. potential impact of AI on disinformation, the psychological impacts of all these risks).

The next 10-15 years will be seen by future historians as a pivot between a breakdown and a breakthrough future. And a key factor that tips the balance one way or the other will be about how effective we are at preventing these global risks, instead of just playing whack-a-mole on their impacts and trying to firefight exponentially increasing levels of complexity. We have to start solving these problems faster than we’re creating them.

My favourite metaphor: it’s like shooting a stretch of rapids on a river. The river, not us, determines the speed and direction of travel. There’s no option to hit pause while we rethink strategy. There’s a real risk of crashing into rocks, with the occupants of the boat tipped into the torrent. But there’s also the prospect of making it safely to the calm, shady pool at the other end — if we look ahead at what’s coming up on the river (foresight, surprise anticipation), make sure vulnerable members of the crew have lifejackets (resilience), and above all if we paddle together (collective action).

3. What might this mean in policy terms?

First up, it’s about function, not form. We shouldn’t zone out on defending particular institutions (like the UN) or particular tools (like aid or defence spending) for the sake of it: we should be interested in what gets the job done of making the UK and the world safer, and using every means at our disposal to do so.

It’s also not about single issues. Instead it’s about taking a strategic approach to managing all kinds of risks, and recognising them all as part of a bigger resilience mission. So for example it’s about...

• Defending Ukraine and NATO in face of the threat from Russia

• Being ready for the next pandemic

• Protecting climate stability

• Tackling money laundering in the financial system

• Stress testing key supply chains (like food) against possible global trade shocks

• Anticipating where the next financial crisis could come from

...and recognising the need for collective approaches to all of these areas, and intensively building coalitions and alliances in pursuit of them.

It also entails distilling all of this complexity into a clear, simple agenda - ideally one that can be summarised in 3 or 4 words a la Take Back Control. (My two cents’ worth: Make the World Safe Again. It’s cheeky. I like that about it.)

It’s worth saying too that this agenda has to be led from the centre, by the Prime Minister, supported by a properly resourced coordination infrastructure in the Cabinet Office — not left to the Foreign Office.

Because as much as FCDO likes to claim it leads on this set of issues, the reality is that it leads on a vanishingly small slice of them: other government departments lead, for instance, on defence, climate, pandemics, financial stability, supply chains, AI, and many more — and FCDO has no real levers for driving coordination across them.

4. What about aid?

So where does aid fit in to all this? It needs to be seen as part of this agenda (not a standalone endeavour, as in the past) — but also as a crucial part of this agenda.

Yes, the world has moved on since the 2000s. Lots of formerly ‘developing’ countries are now part of the rich world. Others are still emerging, but have huge capacity to mobilise their own resources.

But others — almost all fragile or conflict affected states — don’t. They risk being left far behind, and becoming sources of multiple kinds of instability (organised crime, conflict, terrorism, uncontrolled migration and more).

So the case for action is partly about Labour’s stated values of protecting the most vulnerable, around the world as well as at home.

But it’s also about being smart (and cost effective) and recognising that it makes far more sense to nip instability in the bud, where it starts, rather than spend ten times as much on addressing symptoms — look at how much aid goes on hotels for refugees [£2.2 billion last year].

And this is why it’s so important to rebuild aid spending as soon as we can. Not just to protect the most vulnerable (though absolutely that too). But because the less we invest in stability at source, the more dangerous is the world that results.

5. The populist dimension

It’s worth saying explicitly — the surge in populist politics is really relevant to all this.

It’s not just that global issues drive domestic impacts. It’s also that global issues set the scene for the rise of the populist right, in UK and around the world. Populists excel at taking complex global issues and turning them into fear of the Other, them-and-us dynamics and so on.

Of course the truth is that they have no actual solutions to offer — just a toxic blend of nostalgia, rhetoric, and division. They stand for an ‘every country for itself’ approach that can’t solve issues that sprawl across boundaries, they actively undermine alliances we depend on to protect ourselves, and they’re wilfully head in the sand about crucial risks like climate.

There’s real risk of a vicious circle here. The more that global instability drives populism, the more populism erodes our capacity to take collective action to do anything about global risks, which then increases global instability, which then drives even more support for populism, and so on.

What we need instead is an approach that’s grown up, joined up, and geared up — based neither on charity nor on ‘Britain First’, but on mutuality, interdependence, and working together, at home and internationally, to get the job done.

Links I liked

Elaine Godfrey had a great piece in the Atlantic on how the manosphere is turning on Trump…

…and Heather Parry wrote a fantastic essay on how young men getting drawn into the manosphere are getting played by late stage capitalism and need to get politically organised instead.

Lots of smart thinking in this piece by Fatima Ibrahim and Hannah Martin on how the UK climate movement needs to do a better job of seizing electoral opportunities.

And here’s a deeply lovely piece by Ellie Robins on building a real world memory garden as a practice for sparking imagination.