Power, polarity, and prudence: the ambiguities and implications of UK discourse on a multipolar international system

ABSTRACT

What do UK policymakers mean when they say that Britain’s strategic environment is returning to “multipolarity”? In realist international theory, polarity is a specific causal concept; the number of powers capable of balancing even the most capable other state(s) in the international system (“poles”) is taken to determine the system’s stability. Does the post-2017 appearance of polarity references in British security policy documents therefore reflect some unexpected UK renaissance of realist thought? Or is something else going on, as recent work by Ben Zala suggests? This article will demonstrate that, while UK official usage of the “multip–” word has indeed flourished recently, the term is actually being used in a more elastic, less bounded way than realism prescribes in order to generate other kinds of political effect. Specifically, “polarity” (and its “multi-” prefix) is used to characterise the behaviour of those major states that oppose Western-preferred international order, to elide Britain’s own relative power/status tensions, and to capture an expansive laundry-list of perceived international dangers. The article then discusses five ways in which a shift in polarity could negatively affect Britain; important consequences that merit preparatory contemplation, yet that an imprecise, catch-all understanding of “multipolarity” too readily obscures.

KEYWORDS:

• Britain
• great powers
• realism
• discourse
• polarity
• balancing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See, most seminally, Waltz (1979).

2. On the notion and (contested) implications of such a “moment”, see Krauthammer (1991 [1990]), Wohlforth (1999), Brooks and Wohlforth (2008, 2015), Monteiro (2014).

3. At least barring some improbable contingency, e.g. state dissolution in both America and China.

4. The “R2P” phrase was coined by the Canadian-instigated International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in the same year as the 9/11 attacks (2001), and was subsequently endorsed by the UN at the 2005 World Summit. Of course, what was already a controversial notion – external powers giving themselves the prerogative to intervene in other states’ domestic affairs if they did not like those states’ chosen policies – became further tainted through its invocation by powers, Britain included, engaged on military operations in theatres such as Iraq for other, manifestly non-humanitarian reasons (Moses et al. 2011). Indeed, Britain’s choices on Iraq managed to neither reinforce the US alliance nor uphold the authority of the UN Security Council – both professed goals of “liberal” UK strategy (Ralph 2011, 2013a, 2013b).

5. Illustratively, between the 1998 SDR and the 2015 SDSR, Royal Naval frigate/destroyer numbers fell from 35 to 19 while “hunter-killer” submarine (SSN) numbers fell from 12 to 6, highlighting the deep cuts to the sorts of capabilities most needed for securing control of Britain’s maritime region against major state adversaries. It is important to recognise too that – with an approximate training-maintenance-deployment ratio of 1:1:1 for such forces – this means a deployable average at any one time of only six frigates/destroyers and two SSNs for all of the UK’s global naval commitments, stretching the fleet unprecedentedly thin. Of course, the flaws of the 2010 SDSR even in dealing with the sorts of “discretionary” operations that it anticipated were manifested almost immediately (Dover and Phythian 2011).

6. They were outputs of a particular configuration of bureaucratic politics too (Crowcroft and Hartley 2012), naturally, but the options available to different arms of Britain’s foreign-policy machinery were all ultimately underpinned by a particular configuration of relative power. Indeed, some combination of liberalism and self-interest operating within a unipolar system likely explains the observed continuity in UK appetite for interventionism throughout the premierships of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and David Cameron – despite their partisan differences and the intervening shock of 9/11 – at least until the Ukraine crisis of 2014 swayed Cameron back to concern for state-based defence via the 2015 SDSR in the latter years of his government (Honeyman 2017).

7. Britain has at times sought to support US hegemony without deep military entanglement of its own, of course, most notably by eschewing a troop commitment to the Vietnam War. Yet even here, Britain still provided diplomatic support and various forms of stand-off/covert military assistance, while also providing the most important prop to the European dimension of US global strategy (and thereby enabling Washington’s massive Asian commitment of the time).

8. On such encroachment and Russian sentiment towards it, see Shifrinson (2016).

9. The Chinese economy is already bigger vis-à-vis its US counterpart than the Soviet Union’s ever was. Of course, China also faces much more acute demands on its wealth than the US, given its relative development disadvantage – but that was also true of the USSR, which nonetheless managed to function as a systemic “pole”, not least because it avoided an ambitious US-style grand strategy of global power projection (as China has also eschewed thus far).

10. Note that – unlike its 2010 predecessor – the 2015 SDSR was published as a single combined document with that year’s National Security Strategy.

11. Contrary to widespread expectations, furthermore, the Government refrained from further cuts to the Defence Budget during the 2015 Spending Review – although this decision had domestic-political motivations, as well as international-strategic ones (Dorman et al. 2016).

12. China is mentioned only as an esteemed economic partner, for example, despite the document also featuring a sub-section (HM Government 2015, p. 18–19) on foreign intelligence agencies’ cyber efforts to penetrate UK government/infrastructure and steal commercial secrets – both known Chinese tactics. On UK defence/intelligence fears over Chinese leverage, particularly in cyber infrastructure, see – for example – BBC (2018).

13. For one such exemplar from the pre-Crimea era, see HM Government (2010b). For similar US National Intelligence Council analysis from a similar time, see US Government (2008).

14. Or some variant of this core intuition (Waltz 1979, p. 129–31, Mearsheimer 2001, p. 5, Monteiro 2014, p. 40–47). Of course, this does not mean that realists always agree on prevailing configurations of polarity, or even on appropriate criteria for its measurement (see, for example, Layne (2012) versus Wohlforth (2012)). It is also important to demarcate realist understandings of polarity (a distribution of power) from hegemony (an ordering strategy) (Wilkinson 1999, Cronin 2001). Nonetheless, the central shared insight of structural perspectives is that, while states need not be precisely equal in total capabilities to “count” as poles, they must have the independent capacity to balance against the forces of any other state in the system. For a valuable recent effort to classify “powers” by their proportional share of systemic capabilities, see Shifrinson (2018, p. 187–189) – but again, this is not the same insight as polarity, which is ultimately about relational balancing capacity.

15. This tendency pervades contemporary UK security policy, owing to the post-2010 design of the National Security Risk Assessment (NSRA) from which all other policy plans follow (Blagden 2018a).

16. Of course, the USSR itself was never a true “equal” of the USA; Soviet GDP peaked at a mere 44.5% of the US total in 1975 (Maddison 2003), while Soviet technology never matched NATO’s overall lead. Nonetheless, given a combination of favourable PPP terms, willingness to impose domestic privations, and proximate location vis-à-vis the pivotal Western European theatre, the USSR was capable of deploying sufficient military capability to balance the forces (and associated regional policy preferences) of even the most capable other state(s) in the system – a threshold that Britain has not been able to meet since 1945. Mao’s China was also unable to meet this regional balancing criterion, given its inability to thwart American dominance of the Pacific Rim, for all that the 1950s People’s Liberation Army was sufficient to thwart limited US war aims in Korea.

17. To be sure, voters are often less enthusiastic about military intervention than policy elites. Nonetheless, as recently as 2013 – i.e. even after the government’s failed attempt to win Parliamentary approval for military intervention in Syria on the back of post-Iraq/-Afghanistan public war-weariness – 75 percent of Britons thought the UK should play a major role in the world to promote its economic interests, while 65 percent thought the same to promote national security interests (YouGov 2013, p. 7–8).

18. This is consistent with – and complemented by – a posture of “strategic latency”, whereby smaller-than-useful pockets of multiple capabilities are retained on the understanding that they could be scaled back up in a more dangerous future threat environment (Cornish and Dorman 2015).

19. For description and enthusiastic advocacy of this behavior, see Hemmings and Rogers (2019). Such risk does not mean that it is necessarily the wrong choice, of course, but neither should policymakers or analysts be deluded that such choices are costless.

20. Of course, UK strategic options do not distil to some false binary of “independent superpower” versus “US vassal”. As noted above, even under unipolarity, there has still been a structurally-definable category of major powers that – although not “poles” – possess leeway unavailable to most states. And within this tier, different states choose different strategies; whereas China and Russia seek to balance the US superpower, and France pursues a US alliance marked by conscious separation, Britain has complemented its close US alignment with other layers of deep integration into multilateral organisations, regimes, and networks (what two successive Foreign Secretaries respectively referred to as a “global hub” strategy (Blitz et al. 2007) and “networked foreign policy” (Hague 2010)). Still, while states face plenty of choices in terms of how to behave in order to best serve their interests, power is not the same as strategy and “greatness powerness” can thus have only two meanings: whether others see a state as discharging a great-power role/status (i.e. intersubjective recognition) or whether a state is capable of mobilising sufficient national resources to independently secure their interests against the possible predations of others (i.e. an objective criterion). Britain prizes both understandings, but they sometimes stand in tension nonetheless (Blagden 2018b).

21. For Russia’s 2018 nominal GDP (on an exchange-rate basis) in comparative perspective, see IMF (2019). That said, it is worth noting that Russian GDP on a PPP basis is much larger (close to that of Germany).

22. These include demographic decline, productivity-impeding corruption, creativity-stifling authoritarianism, Western sanctions, lack of trust from potential foreign investors, volatile global hydrocarbon demand, and the “crowding out” of productive investment by the resource-extractive sector (Blagden 2015, p. 338).

23. Such tactics are often now dubbed part of “hybrid warfare”, although the term is banal – every strategic action in history has been “hybrid” in some such way.

24. One silver lining to such developments is that it can be easier to develop broad-based public support for coherent national strategy when there is a direct, defined “threat” than multiple abstract “risks” (Edmunds 2012, Blagden 2018a). That said, Brexit and its domestic fallout may have comprehensively undermined any gains on this front, in terms of national political unity and associated strategic coherence.

25. This is not to say that trade (say) in East Asia is only a “peripheral” UK interest; clearly it is one of the most economically dynamic regions of the world, and Britain will want to pursue commercial opportunities there. Nonetheless, economic engagement does not require a military presence; Germany has massive trade with East Asian states not because it sends warships to their region, but because it makes goods that they wish to buy. And East Asia is peripheral to UK security interests – it is geographically distant from Britain, and the UK is not a salient concern for actors in the region except insofar as it militarily positions itself in their vicinity, meaning that British security dilemmas with Asian powers are wholly avoidable.

26. For valuable (but inconclusive) debate, see Layne (2012), Wohlforth (2012), Shifrinson and Beckley (2013). Contesting whether polarity is even appropriate for measuring change, see Brooks and Wohlforth (2015).

27. On the strategic limitations born of not being one’s own security provider, see Porter (2010). On domestic-political constraints on adequate power-balancing, see Schweller (2008).

28. Neoclassical realism provides a structural explanation for such disregard: domestic-ideational pressures exert more influence over states’ policy when they are relatively safe and the constraining effects of anarchy are therefore weaker; in an international system of more pressing relative threats, by contrast, states will have less scope to indulge their domestic-political preferences (Walt 2018, p. 6). For valuable discussion of UK behaviour through such a neoclassical realist lens, see Hadfield-Amkhan (2010).

29. This does not necessarily mean that there is no case for UK support to Ukraine, of course. It simply means that in choosing to support the expansion of a military alliance created for the containment of Russia into the USSR’s own former territory (still home to important Russian military facilities), and then choosing to join Ukraine’s internal conflict on the Russian-opposed side (via provision of money/equipment/training), London should not then be surprised that such choices engender UK-opposed counter-balancing by a powerful state. Recent UK military cooperation with non-NATO Sweden and Finland – benign though these states may indeed be – similarly smacks of policy chosen without due regard for the likely impact on Russian threat perceptions.

30. For valuable discussion of the relationship between Brexit and Britain’s enduring concerns for world “role” – as now manifested in re-expanding extra-European commitments under the “Global Britain” moniker – see Daddow (2019).

31. Trump’s America and Xi Jinping’s China.

32. In Northern Ireland, Gibraltar, and Cyprus.

33. In Northern Ireland.

34. On such potential balance-of-power implications of Britain’s efforts to leave the European Union (“Brexit”), see Blagden (2017, p. 9–14).

35. This is not a claim that there is one unitary “national interest”; UK interests are multiple, complex, and contested (Edmunds 2014). Nonetheless, they are all topped by survival, since a state that does not survive cannot achieve anything else either (Mearsheimer 2001, p. 31).

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David Blagden

Dr David Blagden is Senior Lecturer in International Security and Strategy at the University of Exeter. He holds a DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford and was previously the Adrian Research Fellow in International Politics at Darwin College, University of Cambridge. He is the co-editor (with Mark de Rond) of Games: Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and his research has been published in International Security, Foreign Policy Analysis, and International Affairs, among other outlets.