UK must nurture alliances in new era of global power politics, says policy adviser

The UK faces a choice between using statecraft to plan and deepen its international alliances or simply managing relations with its rivals and risk sliding into war, Rishi Sunak’s foreign policy adviser has said.

In a sweeping lecture on Britain’s “grand strategic moment”, John Bew drew on how the national character had been shaped by history, claiming the fundamental assumptions about how British leaders have thought about the world had been shaken by events.

Bew, a historian and biographer of Clement Attlee, was the principal author of two Conservative integrated foreign and security reviews in 2021 and 2023, but an incoming Labour government could ask him to remain in position as it seeks some continuity in navigating relations with China, Russia and a more isolationist US – as well as life outside the EU regulatory bloc.

He said: “What is happening in international affairs across Europe is a qualitative shift in the depth of alliances, involving technology, trade and shared defence industrial development.”

As part of this deeper European cooperation, he suggests the UK could become a fourth member of the current Weimar triangle of Poland, Germany and France.

He admitted the strategic “conundrum that the UK faces is one which is being outside a large regulatory bloc, and it has two very close allies and partners in the EU and the United States, which share values and most security concerns as well.