What is Global Britain? This is a question that has been asked, mostly witheringly, in Washington since Theresa May first picked up this coinage in the aftermath of the 2016 referendum. Now with the launch of “Global Britain In A Competitive Age”, the government’s 114 page integrated review of Britain in the world, DC has got its first major look at both how the British government sees a changing world and its plan to compete in it. And it likes what it sees. 

The Government’s Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy is the most important British strategy document since end of Cold War. Its significance comes not only from its unprecedented scope across policy areas; perhaps even more important is the strategic conception, the intellectual armature around which it is designed. At its heart is the idea of strategic competition understood in its genuine geostrategic-military sense rather than as a simplistic sporting-race analogy.

Should groups of campaigners have a veto over certain public appointments? Presumably, most of us would say no. Yet this is effectively what is now being attempted as part of a boycott campaign opposing the appointment of William Shawcross as independent reviewer of Prevent; the national counter-radicalisation programme.

The UK’s Washington embassy – the flagship for its global diplomatic operation – needs a shake-up to secure British influence with the Biden administration and a Democrat-controlled Congress. A ‘Washington strategy’ for British diplomacy, authored by the journalist and think-tanker Ben Judah, urges the Government to “recognise the need for radical diplomatic change in a post-Brexit and post-Trump world”.

Among Democrats, there is no American who knows more about Asia and is better known in Asia than Kurt Campbell. The news in recent days that President Joe Biden has appointed him as Co-ordinator for the Indo-Pacific, a new role within the National Security Council, is therefore very welcome. Campbell has effectively become Biden’s Asia tsar.

The appointment is good news for the UK and for the broader Western alliance. Campbell has a long history of engagement with Asia in both the Clinton and Obama administrations. He is credited with authoring Obama’s “pivot” to Asia and is considered to be a tough foreign policy realist who understands the shifting power dynamics of the Indo-Pacific region – and how America can work with allies to manage them. That is, after all, the single greatest foreign policy challenge facing the incoming Biden administration.