Plans for the UK to re-establish formal foreign policy and security ties with the European Union, frozen during negotiations on a trade agreement, will never be revived, as UK foreign policy focuses on bilateral ties in Europe. and the development of new alliances in the Indo-Pacific and Middle East.
The freeze marks a little-discussed reversal of thought in Theresa May’s era, when the political statement at the time of Britain’s withdrawal spoke of negotiating deep cooperation between the UK and the EU.
May herself told the Munich security conference in 2018: “Europe’s security is our security and the UK is unconditionally committed to maintaining it. The challenge for all of us today is to find a way to work together, through a deep and special partnership between the UK and the EU, to preserve the cooperation we have built and go further to address the evolving threats we face. together. ”
The EU even published proposals on how this cooperation could work in detail, but the UK has not picked up on the ideas.
The change of the UK from the May era has not been formally announced by any side and its implications have been little discussed.
For the EU, while trying to integrate its own foreign policy, the fear must be that Britain may undermine its foreign policy rules, just as it fears that the UK will diverge over trade rules. But British diplomats believe the UK’s post-Brexit has already shown independence of judgment and little ability to compare with the EU, where cumbersome decision-making requires the EU’s 27 foreign ministers to be agreement. The disadvantages of avoiding EU foreign policy are undetectable to conservative Eurosceptics.
Thus, over the last year, the United Kingdom has cooperated with the EU in a strictly ad hoc manner, often following its own path on issues such as sanctions. For example, in the case of Belarus, the United Kingdom (along with Canada) imposed sanctions against the Minsk regime before the EU (and the US) agreed on its packages. The EU and the United States appeared to have coordinated their respective measures, but EU measures were blocked and delayed by Cyprus threatening a veto.
By contrast, the response to the poisoning of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny led to close coordination between the EU and the UK, following the 2018 Skripal case plan.
In the case of Turkey’s gas drilling in the eastern Mediterranean, the EU has introduced some sanctions and may introduce more in March, while Britain has set it aside, unwilling to offend either party. As France and Turkey traded insults and Germany mediated, the UK outside the EU has been free to step away, perhaps thinking about the trade deal it seeks with Turkey.
In Libya, where the UK was pivotal to the 2011 revolution, it has recently been kept on the sidelines watching the EU railway over Turkish breaches of the UN arms embargo and leaving the EU to the police of migrants crossing the Mediterranean to Spain and Italy. On some issues, last year has shown an advantage in diplomatic discretion.
The main European forum in which the UK is active remains E3: Germany, France and the UK. Here, at least in public, major European powers have remained on the sidelines of Iran’s nuclear deal, resisting pressure from the United States to declare the deal broken and to incorporate Iran’s nuclear non-compliance into the mechanism. dispute resolution, a means by which the agreement could be declared dead.
E3 has also become increasingly coordinated on Iranian human rights violations and, at the level of political director, have discussed broader issues, including Russia. But in Ukraine, only the UK has offered a defense and a political partnership with Kiev.
In general, EU plans for institutionalized cooperation seem dead, or at least latent. Rosa Balfour, director of Carnegie Europe, writing in a pamphlet from the Foreign Policy Center, suggests: “The EU must give up, for the time being, the hope that the UK will participate in any institutionalized agreement. The foreign policy of the British government is ideologically driven; EU action is strongly driven by processes. The gap between the two is one of the causes of Brexit. “
UK diplomats analyze the foreign policy agenda of Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign affairs and security policy representative, and step back. His call for a larger majority vote on foreign policy through a “constructive abstention” and for the EU to use the language of power is not appealing to the UK. Similarly, in the eyes of the British, the contrast between Emmanuel Macron’s call for a stronger united Europe and the elaboration of unilateral French foreign policy reveals the farce of integrated foreign policy.
In fact, EU foreign policy has too often resembled the coalition of those who do not want to. But some policymakers say the EU-UK foreign policy debate will pick up, albeit only by three deep compensatory forces.
Worldly reality may lead the UK to realize that the impact of its foreign policy is multiplied if it works with the EU. The Biden administration would also prefer the UK not to be independent, if in doing so it weakens the EU. Finally, the EU will slowly integrate its defensive arm and has already established a way in which third parties, such as the United Kingdom, could participate.
Ian Bond, at the Center for European Reform, can see three ways in which the UK and the EU could formally collaborate: in the exchange and protection of classified information, the involvement of UK staff in missions and operations defense and UK involvement in defense industrial cooperation through the European Defense Agency.
But it may take the dust off Biden’s full business talks and punch for these discussions to begin.