Opinion | China or America? Boris Johnson’s Brexit Britain seeks a new strategy as Sino-US rivalry deepens

Britain needs friends both old (the US) and new (China), but openly courting Chinese investment, especially in tech, will sever transatlantic relations, while hewing to US sanctions will lose Britain the massive Chinese market

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Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson, seen during a visit to the Fulham Science Centre in Oxfordshire on August 8, will have to put on his thinking cap to navigate the tricky US-China strategic dilemma as Britain prepares to leave the European Union. Photo: AFP

Published: 9:00pm, 14 Aug 2019Updated: 2:59am, 15 Aug 2019

Lord Palmerston best described Britain’s grand strategy when he declared that the country has no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies: “Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”

And one perpetual British interest is that no state in continental Europe should ever be allowed to establish continental hegemony. So Britain has acted as an offshore balancer, pivoting to the weaker continental coalition and allying with almost every single major power of continental Europe before eventually balancing against its former allies when those became dangerously strong.

This was also why, in the past century, Britain fought in the first and second world wars, and joined the cold war. Its cautious membership of the European Community was to ensure that European integration would never exceed the absolute minimum required to balance the Soviet threat.

When this threat was eclipsed in the early 1990s, Britain opted out of the next ambitious stage of the European Union: the European Monetary System, which led to the euro zone.

In a sense, the Brexit process was initiated not by former prime minister David Cameron’s strategic blunder in accepting a 2016 referendum, but grew from the British decision back in 1992 to preserve its monetary autonomy.

Since then, Britain has opposed every major integrationist European reform, including defence initiatives that shifted the focus from Nato to a European army. In that role, Britain has found utility in its special relationship with the United States.