Like Brexit, Boris Johnson's vision for 'global Britain' is an idea not a policy

Defence reviews and foreign policy resets come and go in British politics. Some of their conclusions struggle to survive sustained contact with the real world. Most are remembered only by defence specialists and whichever armed service does well – or badly – out of the reordered spending that is each review’s core purpose.

Occasionally, there is a substantial exception, a defence review that embodies a real strategic decision that resonates across the years, both in the wider world and at home. Labour’s 1968 “east of Suez” withdrawal white paper was a notable example. It marked a major step in the dismantling of Britain’s post-imperial role. Arriving in the wake of Brexit, Boris Johnson’s integrated review of foreign and defence policy this week had the potential to be another.

The new review, titled Global Britain in a Competitive Age, proves to be no such thing. This is not to imply that it has no value. On the contrary. The review is a genuinely interesting read, with things to teach, not least on cyber and AI. One Tory MP wryly praised it for aspiring to coherence. That coherence – if some striking omissions were only filled in – would provide a good starting point for an incoming Labour government, if there ever is one. The review will certainly be important for the armed services and industries that benefit from its conclusions.

But there remains a fundamental disjunction between the review’s often serious ambition and its more meretricious political uses, particularly in Johnson’s hands. This disjunction was always inherent in the exercise itself. The review’s purpose was to offer fresh coherence to Britain’s foreign, defence and aid policies in the wake of its self-expulsion from the European Union. The need for such an exercise was self-evident. Since 1945, Britain had seen itself as the European rock on which the transatlantic alliance with the United States rested. But Brexit has wrecked Britain’s credibility in Europe. Hence the government’s recourse to the conceit of “global Britain”, a glib post-imperial phrase lacking the content that the review was tasked with supplying.

This was never going to be easy. In spite of Brexit, Britain remains a European nation. Its trade, culture, security and prosperity are always going to be bound up with Europe. Yet the review’s underlying purpose was to justify turning our back on the continent we share. There is, therefore, a hole in the middle where Europe should be. The continent is treated as a security commitment, largely for Nato-related reasons, but it is not treated as important in any other context. The policy towards Europe is one of flat denial.

In the recesses of the review, it is true that there are some brief sections about parts of Europe – a paragraph about France, another about Germany, a third about Ireland. But in more than 100 pages, there are only a handful of references to the EU, without which these bilateral relationships cannot be easily understood or developed. Spain is mentioned once. Belgium, for whom Britain went to war a century ago, not at all.

Where Europe is absent from the review, Asia is suddenly present. The continent has been called into existence to redress the self-inflicted imbalance in Europe. Britain’s so-called “tilt” towards Asia is absorbing much learned attention. You can occupy your entire week attending online seminars about different aspects of it. But the tilt is gentle, and it does not amount to a grand strategy. Every economically developed nation and trade alliance is already in the same game. The US, which at least borders the Pacific, has been doing this for at least 20 years. All Britain is doing is trying to get some deals, which will never replace the lost trade on our doorstep.

In reality, the Indo-Pacific region of which so much is being made does not even exist as such. The Indo-Pacific is little more than a speculative sweep of the prime minister’s hand across a map of the world hanging on a Foreign Office wall. Britain is not in reality about to become a major power in the Pacific. China is not about to change its ways because Johnson has committed the UK’s expensive new aircraft carrier fleet to the South China Sea, pretending he is engaged in 21st-century gunboat diplomacy.

Nor has the review clarified many of the most acute and difficult current issues that it sought to cover. Policy towards China is no clearer than before. Is China a hostile state or merely a “systemic challenge”? Many Tories believe the former; the review says the latter. If Britain stands for values as well as interests, as the review says, how does that square with continuing arms sales to Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Gulf states? If allies such as the US see the purpose of nuclear weapons as deterrence, why does Britain now think they could be used against cyber or other technological threats? That hardly fits with Britain’s role in trying to prevent Iranian proliferation.

Johnson’s brief Commons speech launching the review gave a clear indication of the extremely limited and opportunistic political purpose of the exercise, as he sees it. It was a terrible, and terribly cynical, speech. It contained no detail, nor any attempt at setting a strategy. The EU was not alone in going unmentioned. He said nothing about Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia or the Middle East. And Donald Trump and Joe Biden might as well not have existed, so unchanging was the analysis of the US’s role in the world.

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Johnson had little to say about global strategy because, in truth, he has no such strategy. Or, rather, because his strategy is to play to the domestic gallery. The deeper object of the exercise did not go beyond the one that Johnson presumably tasked Prof John Bew and his review team with supplying. We have left the EU. Russia is a problem. So is China. We have got nuclear weapons and new aircraft carriers. Please provide me with a foreign and defence strategy speech to fit these disconnected facts.

What matters with Johnson, though, is always the performance not the substance. Any passing attempt to explain what global Britain actually means was, as usual, just gas in a balloon. You soon sensed the feeling, one sketch-writer observed this week, that Johnson’s university tutorial partners must have become familiar with when he read out a student essay – that he had simply not done the reading.

But this is Johnson’s way. It always has been. In an important sense, it is also his skill. Global Britain, like Brexit, is an idea not a policy. What matters to Johnson is to please his supporters. He does this by spurning Europe and, perhaps, by implying that Britannia rules the waves. Both are historic and peculiarly Tory emotions. You do not have to look far back at the modern political history of Britain to see it is working for him. The more important question is whether it will work for the whole of the next decade, especially once Johnson decides to step down and spend more time with his money.

• Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist