The government has promised “the deepest review of British foreign, defence and security policy in 30 years”. But even at the outset that review is undermined by many of the same

difficulties that have prevented truly new approaches to thinking about Britain’s place in the world and what its foreign policy should be trying to achieve. Tobias Ellwood, the chairman of

the Defence Select Committee, suggested that the defence review was “Our opportunity to press the reset button, understand what role we want to play on the international stage and . . .

invest in our defence posture so we can make our mark”. Sadly, a recent National Audit Office (NAO) report suggests that such a “reset” may well currently be impossible and rather than being

overarching implication is that years of avoiding difficult decisions about what capabilities to eliminate, have resulted in the MoD pursuing a wide spectrum of expensive equipment that

cannot possibly all be funded. We have focused on F-35 jets, new aircraft carriers and tank numbers instead of identifying the capabilities we need in order to achieve our national interest.

Part of the explanation is because we have lacked a grand strategy to provide guidance. The announcement of the deployment of further British troops to Mali, in a UN peacekeeping operation

later this year, illustrates exactly the conceptual problem the UK faces, not to mention its real world consequences. Britain is already deployed in Mali, in support of a French

counter-extremism operation. This raises the bizarre position of Britain supporting a combat operation at the same time as a peacekeeping operation in the same country. The reasoning behind

Britain’s relatively modest contribution of 250 troops has not been adequately explained. Britain’s increased presence comes as the US appears to be drawing down in Africa and also comes

before the international community more broadly has committed the necessary resources to act decisively against Islamist extremism in the Sahel. How anachronistic for two former colonial

powers to be acting together in Africa. No wonder that Britain’s limited military resources are overstretched — but to what strategic end? The idea and practice of liberal interventionism

has overtly shaped British foreign policy since Tony Blair’s electoral success in 1997. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan caused Theresa May to change course in January 2017 with her

assertion that “the days of . . . intervening in sovereign countries in an attempt to remake the world in our own image are over”. Much the same lesson has been learnt in America. Even

before Trump pledged “America First” with its attendant isolationism, Barack Obama had already stepped back from intervention in Libya or Syria. The retreat from liberal interventionism may

well be the correct course to pursue for the UK, but it has left confusion in strategic terms that needs to be answered. The government’s early commitment to “Global Britain” begs more

questions than it answers. It proclaims, “We need to use government assets . . .to maintain our global standing. Global Britain is about reinvesting in our relationships, championing the

rules-based international order and demonstrating that the UK is open, outward-looking and confident on the world stage.” These are familiar words, but their use here resembles a public

relations exercise. There is no sense of why we need to maintain our global standing or whether championing the rules-based international order is the same thing as defending it globally.

There is no small amount of irony that it was one of the architects of Blair’s muscular Chicago Doctrine, Lawrence Freedman, who expressed Britain’s current position in a speech last month.

“So much of the discussion on this topic in the past has assumed that we are entitled to our seat at the top table and that Britain is one of the countries upon which world order does and

should depend . . . this is not immediately apparent at the moment to either the international community or, as importantly, to our own population  . . . If we believe that the UK should be

engaged internationally, then this is a case that needs to be made and not assumed.” The most important reason for a reappraisal of UK grand strategy is not so much Brexit, but the shift in

how the US deploys its power. Not because the special relationship is dead — it has always ebbed and flowed — but rather it is not clear what the partnership with America is meant to

achieve. Since the Atlantic Charter, the UK and US have worked together on a series of shared projects, winning the Second World War, fighting and then ending the Cold War, shaping the

post-Cold War period and, lastly, fighting the war on terror. There were certainly policy disagreements between the two, but these shared goals created a framework for cooperation. Without

the US providing global leadership, the UK finds itself in a position it has not been in since before the Second World War, of having to define a global strategy for itself without a joint

project. For the US, the next major strategic goal appears to be containing China but the Huawei controversy has illustrated the degree of divergence between the UK and US on that goal.

President Macron’s comments about Nato being “brain dead”, followed by Ben Wallace’s observations on the unreliability of the US as an ally, seem to suggest that a substantial part of

Britain’s future strategy must be on bolstering European territorial defence, even after we leave the EU. The argument about European self-defence, given its substantial economic power,

won’t disappear. As the NAO report makes clear, the impossibility of full spectrum defence spending for the UK means that we should be at the forefront of shaping European defence

capability. In the longer term, US strategic divergence means Nato’s continuation, in its current form, seems unlikely. As one recent article suggested, at first principle, Britain has four

vital defence requirements. First, preventing foreign troops in the UK. Second, securing our cities from aerial assault. Third, as a trading island we must be able to ensure the freedom to

use the Atlantic to trade and import food and energy. Finally, we need to be able to project force to protect our overseas territories and honour commitments to Nato and others. Exactly how

we meet these vital interests and reconcile them with our existing commitments is a significant challenge. The government has set a punishingly short agenda for the defence review to answer

these questions by the autumn. As we face what looks to be an unexpected national emergency in the form of Covid-19, we remember just how little of our strategic environment can be

anticipated.