There is still a glaring double standard between how the UK treats Russia and China

Over the past couple of weeks, as most “normal” people have been talking about the timetable for vaccinations and when they can meet more than one household indoors or even go abroad on holiday, foreign policy practitioners and wonks have been immersed in the UK government’s blandly named Integrated Review, and its companion, the Defence Command Paper.

Many hoped this might be where we find the blueprint for Global Britain – the way this government sees the UK’s place in the world, now that we have slipped our institutional moorings from the European Union. And those hopes were partly vindicated.

Together, the two documents are more realistic, in the sense of being less ideological and in the sense of being a little more modest and collaborative, less bombastically Rule Britannia, than many had envisaged – or than some of the advanced billing had (deliberately?) suggested. And thank goodness, at least, for that. Perpetually laying claim to a global leadership role that the UK is neither equipped nor qualified to exercise becomes as self-defeating and exhausting over time as it appears presumptuous. Could this country finally be starting – tentatively if is true – to accept our limitations as a medium-sized country at the northwestern edge of Europe and act accordingly?

Well, yes – and no. At first sight, the review perpetuates one big contradiction in the UK’s big-power relationships. There is still a glaring double standard between how the UK treats our nearest big neighbour, Russia, and how it treats the further, much bigger and rising power, China.

Russia, the review says early on, “will remain the most acute threat to the UK”. It will be “more active around the European neighbourhood” (and not in a good way, readers are invited to assume). There is the obligatory reference to the “Salisbury attack”, along with a pledge to “actively deter and defend against the full spectrum of threats emanating from Russia” and “hold Russia to account” for breaching “internal rules and norms”. All this, at least “until relations with its government improve” – as though this was entirely in Russia’s hands.

In the wake of the review’s publication, the Russian embassy in London showed a rare hint of humour, when it tweeted “Welcome to the club, EU!” in response to a Daily Telegraph headline, saying “If the EU continues to act as a hostile state, the UK should treat it as one”.  As seen from Russia, there is something unthinking and dogmatic about this country’s blanket negative portrayal of Russia, to the point where Moscow tends to grit its teeth and just wait for it all to be over.  

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Meanwhile, at the very same time, the UK was lambasting Russia, communist China had been able to insinuate itself, with surprisingly little effort, into a position where it could, potentially, sabotage a large part of our telecoms and nuclear power generation at a stroke. Not that this was specifically reflected in the Integrated Review. To the surprise and disappointment of some, who had expected a harder line on China, the tone towards Beijing was conspicuously measured.

“Open, trading economies like the UK will need to engage with China and remain open to Chinese trade and investment,” it said, while also protecting themselves “against practices that have an adverse effect on prosperity and security”. “Cooperation with China,” will be “vital in tackling transnational challenges, particularly climate change.”

So here we have the distillation of a situation that has prevailed for the best part of 20 years, where London sees Russia as the empire of evil and its leader as a cross between Ivan the Terrible and Stalin, while China is treated as a grown-up state we can do business with and whose autocratic ways are somehow acceptable in a way that Russia’s are not. The excuse is that Russia, as a member of the Council of Europe, has signed up to “our” values. And we have, rather half-heartedly, curbed the banking and travel rights of a handful of officials in response to the repression of the Xinjiang Uighurs, but, of course, this is not the whole story.

There are reasons for the different treatment, or rather one big reason, which is that China is very big and growing – albeit not as fast as it once was, and with a demographic problem down the line – whereas Russia is seen as the hostile successor of the once-mighty Soviet Union, weakened by a sparse and declining population spread over a vast ungovernable space. In other words, we can be as rude and dismissive of Russia as we like, because their capacity to hurt us is limited, whereas China, well, we need to step carefully and try to keep the sea lanes open, while acknowledging that we can probably defend Hong Kong’s way of life more effectively by progressively airlifting out half its population than by forcing a stand-off with Beijing.

That is one message about Global Britain from the Integrated Review. I am not sure, though, that it is the whole message even about China and Russia. And the reason why I am not sure is that the Russia-bashing is actually quite circumscribed, and a way is left open for change. The evolution of China, on the other hand, is not just a major theme, but a presence that permeates the whole document.

Even where China is not specifically mentioned, it is there, as the unspoken reason for practically everything else, from the “tilt to the Indo-Pacific” – a term, by the way, which will surely be dated in the future to precisely this decade when no one really spoke of an all-against-China alignment – to the emphasis on maritime power, science and technology and cyber, and to competition and even warfare conducted by other means. China is shown a wariness as the assumed global power in waiting; Russia, in contrast, emerges as more of a regional, and perhaps temporary, inconvenience.  

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This leads me to wonder about a time, maybe a decade hence, when the interests of Global Britain, and the region around us, may perhaps look a little different from the way they do now. For a start, the bugbear (for the west) that is Vladimir Putin will, probably, have left power. And, while Russia will not necessarily become any more “like us”, its own geopolitical interests and security will always be uppermost, as Trump, the quintessential realist understood – those interests will have more in common with ours, as the spectre of China looms even larger than it does today.

Yes, China could yet implode under the pressure of its own modernisation, but an anarchic China could pose even greater problems for the region and the world than a China cruising serenely towards dominance in Asia. One result, as I see through my glass darkly, would be a UK and a European Union (or whatever either has evolved into by then) that move to make common cause with Russia as a European power and a Eurasian landmass. Whether the US by then sees itself as primarily an Atlantic or Pacific power hardly matters; Europe will have reached new arrangements of its own. By then, too, Turkey’s days as a western military ally of convenience would be over. It will have reverted, as it is already doing, to become a regional power with its own interests taking precedence over other people’s.

A theme of my youth was what seemed the eternal debate about whether Britain should remain “east of Suez”. I failed to see then, and I fail to see now, why the UK should even be trying to project what remains of its power beyond Europe. The so-called “tilt to the Indo-Pacific” that will supposedly underpin our “global” foreign policy thus inspires me with no enthusiasm whatever. If, on the other hand, a shared alarm about China finds Russia and Europe reaching a new accommodation, that seems a rational use of everyone’s strengths. Win-win, as has recently been said in another – UK-EU – context. Maybe we just have to sit and wait.