International Relations and Defence Committee
Uncorrected oral evidence: Multilateralism
Wednesday 2 September 2026
10.35 am
Members present: Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (The Chair); Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon; Baroness Blackstone; Lord Bruce of Bennachie; Lord Darroch of Kew; Lord De Mauley; Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie; Lord Grocott; Lord Houghton of Richmond; Lord Lamont of Lerwick; Baroness Prashar.
Evidence Session No. 9 Heard in Public Questions 96 - 107
Witness
Professor John Bew, Professor of History and Foreign Policy, Department of War Studies, King’s College London, and former foreign policy adviser to the Prime Minister (2019-24).
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
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Professor John Bew.
Q96 The Chair: This is the ninth evidence session of our inquiry into the future of the multilateral system and the UK’s role in it. We welcome Professor John Bew, who is professor of history and foreign policy in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. He has been the foreign policy adviser to quite a number of Prime Ministers over the last few years.
The session is being streamed live on Parliament TV, and a transcript will be taken. We will send you a copy of the transcript and allow you to make any small textual changes that may be necessary. I remind members of the committee that, if they have any relevant interests, they should indicate them when they speak. The only interest I have is that I was the lead reviewer of last year’s strategic defence review.
Thank you very much, Professor Bew, for coming today and listening to our questions. When I ask the first question, please give us a little bit of your background before answering. You have worked for the Government for a number of years and managed relationships with a variety of Prime Ministers, including the last one who has just resigned from the House of Commons. What do you believe are the assumptions that underlie British government policy in relation to the multilateral system? Are they right and are they relevant for today and the future?
Professor John Bew: Thank you very much, Lord Robertson. It is good to see you and other committee members, some of whom I have worked with in government and some I have good academic connections to as well.
Initially, you said to tell you a tiny bit about me. I am an academic by training and an historian in a public policy department, the Department of War Studies at King’s up the road. In 2019 I was asked to go into government, initially in the policy unit at No. 10 as an academic external expert, not particularly party political at that time. That was under the Government of Boris Johnson, and I served through four Prime Ministers in just under six years in No. 10, which seems, first, a long time and, secondly, a lifetime. During that time in particular, which is why you and I have engaged on a number of national security issues, Lord Robertson, I was also involved in the last three UK national security strategies. Those are ministerial-approved documents that are run through the NSC, but I helped lead the team that scribes the documents in each instance.
On your question, Lord Robertson, about assumptions on multilateralism in this period, it has been a remarkably tumultuous period. It is a period that encompasses the end of the first Trump Administration and the start of the second Trump Administration. It had most of the Brexit negotiations, including the TCA. It has involved major shifts in our international spending, large increases in defence spending—although I think you and I, Lord Robertson, would agree it is perhaps not large enough—and simultaneously, partly because of the pressures on public finances, cuts in overseas development spend.
Assumptions were in flux. Throw into that Covid, a greater recognition of great power competition and the war in Ukraine, the existing inherited assumptions that were already fraying a little bit in the 2010s at the end of the war on terror era—and, by the way, that whole national security paradigm and approach you saw in Afghanistan, which ended in 2021—were being contested.
My headline observation is that a lot of the old language—almost the old religion—about how we approach multilateralism was being corroded by a series of shocks and events. We tried, and I think had some success, to settle on a new national security concept and on sharpening our thinking on some of the multilateral institutions. However, by the very nature of the fact that our resource portfolio was changing and the challenges we faced were colliding with the next challenge, we had a series of cascading issues and we have not quite settled upon an entirely coherent new framing for how we think about multilateralism.
Let me give you one tangible example of that. In the last three national security strategies, we purposely avoided the acronym RBIS, which I think will be familiar to lots of you on the committee—the rules-based international system. That was not because we had a sense that the UK was in any way rejecting that system—in fact, the UK was always a net beneficiary of that system, having been, to a great extent, and out of proportion to its national power, a creator of the system and a writer of the rules—but because that was simply no longer a sensible framing for describing the world around us. There was a sense in which the UK, as a very good citizen and a very professional entity when approaching multilateralism, was not quite catching up to some of these hard power realities.
We have tried to move along the language a little bit further in that sense, and I think that is understood across the Foreign Office, National Security Secretariat and in defence. We are on a journey, and we have been on a journey, but I do not think we have finally reached a destination point.
The Chair: That is clear enough. Baroness Blackstone has the next question.
Q97 Baroness Blackstone: I want to ask you about the organisation of our multilateralism, as we have called it. We are a member of a wide range of different multilateral organisations and we have attended more. Is there a need for a central strategy in organising all this activity or can it just go on ad hoc in those different areas?
Professor John Bew: It is very good that the committee is asking that question. I have quite conflicted views on this because we have tried to confront it in government at various points over the last six years or so. It was often stated, possibly in an unthinking way, that the UK is a member of more multilateral institutions than any other country, almost as if this was a good in itself. You could make an argument that historically it has been a good in itself; it expands our influence and gives us a reputation, which I think that we still hold, as a country that plays by the rules and approaches multilateral questions in a collegiate and constructive spirit.
I do not want to dismiss that heritage, which I think is very important, but when faced with the problems we have been faced with, clearly just trundling along with that same multilateralist spirit will not answer the conundrums we face. That has meant that resource and focus have shifted elsewhere. I draw a distinction here between the multilateral institutions that are set up to write rules and regulate at an international level and the tighter collective security organisations, in which I would include the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and perhaps Five Eyes and other entities like that. We have done a very good job at firming up the collective security entities and organisations, and this is again a particular UK specialism. It always struck me, engaging at a NATO level, the extent to which we were skilled at shaping strategic concepts, holding the pens and having quite significant influence in that sense—essentially making people talk and think a little bit like us—in the broader multilateral setting.
Those multilateral institutions have been under immense strain, partly because financing has moved elsewhere. The United Nations has gone through a challenging period. When I was growing up in my teenage years, an intervention by the United Nations Secretary-General carried a political force and significance internationally that it simply does not today. I think that is just a fact of life of where the gravity is. The United States in particular, which has essentially played a significant role as the financial bulwark of the United Nations, has removed more and more funding away from that entity. If you take the associated bodies like the WTO, one thing we are living with following America’s change of approach to multilateralism is the sense in which allowing China to enter the WTO was original sin. Some of the structural bulwarks and supports have been removed from the multilateral system.
Your question precisely was around a bit of order to a central strategy. This is quite hard in government. Often, as an academic on the outside looking in, I would say, “Why do we not simply have a hierarchy of national interests and priorities?” In practical terms, it is very different because we live in a noisy democracy, for all its strengths and weaknesses. Look at the British public response to what happened in Ukraine. Look at what the previous Conservative Government did when it came to BNOs in Hong Kong. Values played a huge part in both of those instances. I think that having such a rigorous focus on national interests is very difficult in practical terms, but we did at various points sit down and say that, in this more squeezed resource environment, we need a more competitive and discretionary approach to what we do in multilateral institutions.
Our skills are, frankly, scurrying around with bits of paper, respecting processes and procedures. We have a highly professional and effective diplomatic service for that as well, but what the centre of government, Ministers and the National Security Council have to do is to be clearer in the articulation of the power and on what really matters and what does not. When that clarity is there, I find that officials adapt to it in spending rounds and have more focus.
We did some internal work, auditing what were the most useful multilateral institutions. I always felt that worked partly because we have had more Permanent Under-Secretaries at the Foreign Office than we have had Prime Ministers over this period and partly because of the change of national security advisers. There were four or five, including acting, national security advisers in this time. There has been so much turmoil at the official as well as the political levels that seeing some of those audits through to fruition has not really happened. I think that it would be useful if the committee alights upon that and highlights it as something we could usefully do.
Baroness Blackstone: Thank you. To use your term “in practical terms”, to which you have referred several times, how would you get the co-ordination that you are implying is necessary and certainly desirable?
Professor John Bew: I think that there are two things implicit in your question. One is what the UK’s priority is for that institution, and that is really the most important thing. The second is how you find the co-operation to achieve effect in those organisations. Truth be told, if you take the United Nations, we are used to working in lockstep with the United States on almost every issue, with some differentiation. The lived experience of being an adviser in No. 10 is often that you are called by the Foreign Secretary’s private office about a vote in the UN Security Council, and we have habits on certain sensitive issues of maybe only voting once removed from the United States. If the United States is voting against something, we may abstain as well. We have these traditions and approaches to the multilateral system that are based on hard, historic, decades-long leanings of interest. That has been set in turmoil and flux.
What we need to do in each of these instances—I think this applies to multilateralism but is also increasingly a characteristic of our foreign policy; the last Prime Minister had a name for it and you know it when you see it—which is have coalitions of the willing. That is likeminded groupings, often mini-lateral groupings, acting in concert when approaching and tackling these issues. I can think of certain examples of that.
It is harder to achieve broad-based international coalitions where you would have the United States and China—and Russia, historically, in previous eras—agree on a set of issues. These are harder and harder. When the most important moment for multilateral co-operation came over Covid, it was certainly felt that it was strongly every man for themselves at that critical moment. I remember allies and partners picking up ventilators from runways that were due for delivery in the UK.
Our lived experience suggests that you have to build from likeminded coalitions that are being actively led in that direction by their Governments. On that basis, you might be able to build a better multilateral system.
Q98 Lord De Mauley: Professor Bew, you started to talk about the fact that already Governments are considerably more selective about which institutions and initiatives we engage in, due to budgetary pressures, international challenges and so on. You mentioned the idea of a government audit of the various organisations, which I think you said you had actually engaged in or they had been engaged in. Can you expand on how that went and what the conclusions were?
Professor John Bew: Yes. It was apparent that some of the traditional multilateral institutions that we signed up to in all good faith were being utilised more effectively by countries that may not always share our interests or values. Some of the sharper end of that reality began to impose itself on policy. I will give you one example that is often cited—I think it is cited in the written evidence for this committee from Policy Exchange and others—and that is the International Telecommunication Union. With telecommunications technology rollout—all that is implied with the data and the digital domains—there was a sense in which we had had perhaps a naive and complacent attitude to those organisations and that countries like China were more effectively mobilising and utilising those rules in their own interests.
Another example is the WTO. If you had any conversation with a group of Democrat or Republican strategists, they would all refer back to this critical moment as the time when they thought the US had taken the wrong turn. The logic there was that bringing China into the multilateral system was of benefit to everyone and that China would end up looking more like us. It is a very familiar argument now. I do not need to quote Fukuyama to anyone in this room, but we are recoiling from that story in different ways.
The dilemma comes with what your approach is to this. The UK instinct, which I think is still the proper instinct, is not to walk out of those organisations and run down our support for them, because they uniquely matter for us. Take something like the WTO. International trade as a proportion of US GDP is about 15%; it is much higher for the UK. Some of those multilateral organisations, because of the shape of our political economy and our economic future, matter more to us. It is still our view that staying in those organisations and contesting them is more effective and more sensible.
Long before we had Mark Carney’s notion of middle powers, a lot of American allies would come to us and we would have sensible conversations—which I cannot say too much more about now—and we had to be far more attuned to critical appointments in those areas. A lot of this is about personnel. These are significant regulatory positions, where people are nominally employed by the institution but have nation state allegiances, and we have to be far more competitive to that. We began to go through that area and look at critical jobs that may come up in a number of areas.
The UK is quite well trained to do this. The Foreign Office, for all the kicking it gets, is quite skilled at working out where the key inflection points, nodal points and appointments are for these various committees. Some of it is about personnel and some of it is about co-ordinating with likeminded allies and having a clearer sense of what is coming down the track in critical decisions. I think that we made some progress in that. We did not finally get to an overarching, fully coherent strategy followed at every single level. I think that is quite a difficult thing to achieve, if I am honest with you, for any international body or institution.
Q99 The Chair: Given that resources are very tight and have been very tight in the Foreign Office for quite some time, does that not reflect on Britain’s influence in multilateral organisations?
Professor John Bew: Yes, it does. The rudiments of influence and power in the 2020s are substantially different than they were in the 2000s, and I do not think that I am saying anything that is particularly controversial. Let us be utterly realistic and frank about this and consider the history of these international organisations. I am speaking to you as an historian; I have written on the building of the post-1815 European order and on the building of the post-1945 international order. For me, the people and protagonists involved are heroes in many respects because of what they did, but there is sometimes a misleading story told about the creation of these international bodies and the values they are associated with. These were power games and the arrangements created at the time were reflective of power dynamics. The UK had a particular diplomatic skill and just fell over the line in 1945 as one of the big three and had an outsize influence via serious thinking, diplomatic professionalism and creativity when it came to multilateral institutions. That is a story we should tell and celebrate, but the shape and structure of those positions and institutions are reflective of the reality of power.
Take today’s world. The first and most important metric of national power is our economic heft and power, and that is not a pretty story over the last 10 years and beyond with successive Governments. It is a growth problem and a highly significant issue, probably the most important when it comes to our international influence. The second is defence spending, let us be frank, which is far more important in today’s world as a metric of national power than it was at a time when we were barely squeaking to 2% of GDP on defence and we were very proudly at 0.7% of GDP on overseas development. That has been completely flipped by the reality of the modern world. Then you have even tougher questions within that as to what your defence output is: is the money wasted; how many drones can you get in the sky; how many ships can you get in the sea?
If you take those two metrics—economic growth and economic power, as well as national defence, national security and our contribution to international security—it is not a pretty picture for the UK over this period, and more and more people are catching up. That is where you start.
A third metric is where you sit in multilateral institutions and how much finance you can add to that. A calculation was made in the 1990s that held quite strongly through the war on terror era as the UK managed to get outsize influence by spending more than any of the other G7 countries on overseas development. As that pot has diminished, there are certain ways of influencing those international institutions. The way the funding is done is either through bilateral programmes or—this is primarily where the bulk of it is done—through multilateral institutions. In both instances, if we are not providing the oil to make the machine go round, our influence is necessarily diminished. Just retrieving and perching on your virtue or your professionalism only gets you so far.
However, that being said, I would not be fatalistic about this question of international influence, because there are other areas where we have particular skills and strengths that I would double down and focus on, and which do give cachet in international institutions. We may get on to this in a moment, but one I would highlight, and I will not overstate this, is around AI security technology development in the digital domain. We have developed a pretty effective regime around AI security and AI regulation, which is lighter touch than the European model and more conversant with the American model, but which is, in some respects, more mature when it comes to the assessment of things such as Mythos 5 or suggestions for how you might regulate internationally. If we are able to move into the new domains with the professionalism and the various national attributes we have, the story should not be simply, “Cutting aid and therefore cutting influence in the world”.
On our conversations with countries, many people around this table—I look at Lord Ahmad and others—will have long-term experience of dealing directly with a series of nations that, frankly, those of us in No. 10 deal with less directly, such as countries that sit outside the G7 or G20. They will also appreciate, I think, without putting words in their mouths, that the way in which the UK is valued is changing and there is value in a number of things we bring to the party and, to a certain extent, their own estimation of the importance of something like development spend. Many of these countries where we have traditionally spent a lot of money on development are actually outgrowing us, and therefore they are valuing other attributes from us. Keeping up with that story is important.
A quick note to add to this, Chair, without going on too long, is that if you were approaching an audit of the multilateral system and you were trying to orient what is still a significant portion of our national wealth, which is the overseas development spend, you would not really start with the system you have right now. I do not think you would start with the Development Committee rules. You would not necessarily start with the International Development Act or the way it is reported and the restrictions upon it. You would probably start from scratch, but unfortunately the way that politics and governance works is that it is death by a thousand cuts and on very few occasions do you get a clean sheet of paper to start again with. That is just one thing to say. If you were starting from scratch for an audit of international influence and you said you were going to spend 0.5% or 0.7% of GDP and you were going to sell this to the electorate, you would do it very differently than we do it today.
Q100 Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie: Professor Bew, I want to bring you to talk about the United States. You have already touched on the implications of the US being the financial bulwark of the multilateral systems. What are the implications for us in the UK of what I think you described as turmoil in the US and the US policy towards these institutions? How should the UK respond to a world in which the US is becoming more selective and, frankly, transactional in its engagement with these organisations? Is this a clear direction of travel or is this an exception?
Professor John Bew: I will say three things and then let me elaborate on them. The first is that the history of Britain and multilateral or international institutions through the last 100 years—through the League of Nations and the United Nations—is that, for the UK, they are all built around the indispensable nature of the United States and the indispensable role. The story of the road to 1939 is that the United States helps create the League of Nations and the international order that America sought in the First World War but does not provide the bulwark for collective security and has a schizophrenic relationship to it. The story of the relative soft landing that Britain has had after 1945, bankrupt by two world wars but having a privileged place in the international system despite a disintegrating empire, is built around the role that the United States has played. That is the first point. It is very hard for us to realign too far away from that and I actually would not, and I will elaborate on that in a moment.
The second point is that the US role is changing no matter who you talk to, and I think that this is significant. I spend a lot of time on the east and west coasts of the United States in university settings that are not natural homes for supporters of the Trump Administration, as you can imagine. I speak to Republican strategists and Democrat strategists. We are not going back to the world that we might prefer—let us be absolutely frank about that. Every single one of them is very clear about that. What you actually have is, to a certain extent, quite a lot of continuity in the US approaches: a shift to a far more competitive approach when it comes to China and technology. That can either be a competitive approach that tries to mobilise multilateral institutions in American interests, which was the Biden Administration’s preferred approach, and you can have an audit of that, or one that is far more transactional and visibly transactional. By the way, everyone is transactional now and we could learn a bit of this ourselves as well.
The third point is that I would not write the United States off because of the significant pendulum swings. It is notable to me—and I do not know if this will be confirmed for the next UN General Assembly—that actually Donald Trump does turn up at UN General Assemblies. I remember meeting him at one in 2019 at the end of his first Administration. The US has not completely pulled stumps from the United Nations, even if there is more undercutting of funding. The same applies to NATO in the midst of it. Despite the turmoil and the disorientating nature of this, in a number of key critical policy areas there is room for better transatlantic co-operation. I think that it is understood in Germany, Poland and a number of other European countries and perhaps a constructive agenda in that area.
There is also the point—and Ben Judah, David Lammy’s foreign policy adviser, made this point—that the rest of the world, including a lot of UK allies but also critically in Europe, is going through this China shock 2.0, a concern about Chinese economic practices, dumping and so on. Ben Judah was making the point that we have not fully absorbed that in our own internal debate.
There is a lot that pushes the Western Alliance together. I am not in the mode of entire defeatism and angst. That is not to downplay what we are having now. That is not to say the United States will ever return to a previous position. That is where I am. I am cautious of a foreign policy where we are flouncing from one bloc to another. I think that this is the moment at which one of my former bosses would say that you put your continence pants on—I will let you guess who that might have been—and proceed, do the hard work of diplomacy, keep the mood calm and proceed on that basis. Structurally, there is a lot more in that like-minded grouping than we fully appreciate.
Q101 Lord Lamont of Lerwick: You have mentioned China a lot already and you referred to the United States attitude to the original sin of China joining the WTO. We have had a lot of witnesses who said that China is increasingly using the multilateral institutions to advance its own interests to try to shape the alliances that exist through many institutions. You could say that everybody tries to do that; that is not very different from what the West tries to do as well. What do you think our approach to China should be? It seems obvious that we ought to recognise that China will be a great power for years to come. We cannot be on a path of inevitable confrontation with China, and yet we can sometimes find it difficult to find areas of common interest. What should be the strategy for finding those areas of common interest and what is the right balance?
Professor John Bew: It is such a huge question, Lord Lamont. Let me do my best, with respect to brevity, to try to answer it. All the points you make are completely sensible. It is certainly not in the UK’s interests—and let us start with that lens and prism to look at the question—to have a situation where you are headed towards, at the worst end, military conflict, perhaps a conflagration in the South China Sea or Taiwan as the area of primary concern for a lot of people. It is not necessarily in the UK’s interest to see other forms of confrontation escalation in the midst of US-China relations or other issues. That sounds sensible.
It was my view during my time in government that perhaps the UK was not the first to wake up to some of the sharper ends of the challenge of the rise of China. Inevitably, because of the way our national security systems are intertwined so closely with the United States, we often follow the debates that have been had in the US a few years later in the cycle. When it comes to things like paying far more attention to supply chain security, Chinese investment in critical national infrastructure, Chinese investment or systems for our telecommunications system, there has been a removal of scales from the eye as to the extent and shape of that challenge.
That having been said, it has been hard for Governments to settle upon a coherent and consistent position. After shifting to a more robust approach, it was quite striking—and we would hear this from G7 allies and partners—that the UK went from, in some respects, having one of the softest approaches to China and China security challenges in the 2010s to lurching quite hard in the other spectrum. It meant that we were not able to engage at leader level and that was a source of frustration, not simply for the UK but, importantly, for allies and partners like Japan and Australia, who had their own issues and challenges with China—in fact, issues and challenges that were far more acute than ours—but also valued the price of direct engagement, and valued and hoped that other allies and partners were able to engage directly with China to make those points.
You should be able to have a foreign policy, although sometimes our debate gets very shrill, where you are taking the necessary protective measures to avoid the negative effects of Chinese influence—some intentional, some by virtue of the shape and size of its industrial policy and broader influence—and maintain a space for diplomatic engagement. That should be no surprise to people who understood and lived through the Cold War. It often seemed our political debate would shift from any engagement being bad to what was previously seen as slightly more of an obsequious approach.
The China shock 2.0 is significant. One thing the Biden Administration tried to do with European allies and partners, and had an easier job with the Five Eyes countries and Japan, was to develop a broader, more coherent approach to a range of issues like electric vehicles and export controls to the China challenge, the technology challenge, and to bring allies and partners with it. That is less the Trump Administration’s approach. It had mixed success in getting Europe on the same page, particularly the European Commission.
One of the ironies at the moment is that, partly because of Chinese economic practices and concerns about the European defence industrial base, I do not think that the European Union’s position—and this includes Germany now—has ever been more hawkish or concerned about Chinese economic practices, just as transatlantic relations are tense.
I do not think that there is a simple one-word answer to this question. I was always, frankly, very frustrated when you would produce a national security strategy and in Parliament there would be a debate about whether the Government had used the word “threat” or not. If we are essentialising such a vast and complex problem to a threat designation or otherwise, it will be very hard to have this variegated approach, but it has to be long-term and strategic. Again, I refer to the Policy Exchange written evidence to this committee that talks about some of the challenges with energy transition, which is also likely to create critical dependencies.
It needs to be variegated and detailed with things like critical minerals and planned through, and it must be consistent and long-term. It cannot be flotsam and jetsam against political pressures. Ministers have to stand at the Dispatch Box and face that criticism, but in some cases they also have to make the case for those hard choices. By the way, some of those hard choices are likely to be expensive as we take China out of critical national infrastructure and elsewhere. I think that, essentialising, I am resistant to putting a simple label on what the UK’s approach to China should be. It has to be extremely rigorous and detailed and, in my respect,—we had this in the 2023 national security strategy—most importantly aligned with the positions of like-minded partners, European partners, Australian partners, American partners, where that alignment is possible.
Lord Lamont of Lerwick: Could I press you on the WTO point? I sometimes think that people exaggerate a little when they say the case for admitting China to the WTO was going to lead to democracy and political transformation in China. With hindsight, that is often exaggerated, but it is possible to imagine that the world might have been a lot worse if China had not been admitted to the WTO. There was obviously always going to be a problem with state-owned enterprises. Do you think that anything could be done with the WTO to address some of the problems that have arisen, or has that all gone and everything has to be fixed bilaterally?
Professor John Bew: It is such a good point. I was speaking to some American and British colleagues who were engaged in the process of China’s accession to the WTO and they made a similar point. If you look at the British statements and you dug deeper in the Foreign Office archives and documents, some of which are beginning to emerge in the public domain, there is not a huge end of history Fukuyama naivety about that reality. It is an economic choice made with the sense that it will not transform China. American colleagues said at the same time that partly because the Clinton Administration had to get through a lot of domestic opposition when it came to free trade, open markets, the way that the Democratic Party was landed in different manufacturing zones, it talked up that reality and the strategic effect. Both those stories sit beside each other.
I can imagine a scenario in which WTO reform is possible. I cannot imagine a scenario in which WTO reform is possible without the United States deciding it was in its foremost interest to do so. Given that is the case, I would orient my priorities to focusing on some of the sharper-end economic security issues we have coming down the track. That is where I would be focusing: the critical shortages around chips, potentially, and supply chains and elsewhere. I think that is where I would be spending much more effort. In that regard—and this may be a recommendation for the committee—I do not always think that the international economic wing of the Treasury is sufficiently lined up with the relevant parts of the Foreign Office to make that a coherent offer. That is an area where we could be a little bit more focused.
The Chair: Thank you very much. When we were doing the strategic defence review last year, there was an ongoing China study being done as well, but it never appeared. Why was that?
Professor John Bew: I went back into government for a short period from April to the NATO summit as an appointment to the Cabinet Office to help with the Starmer Government’s national security strategy, and the China audit was around at that time. I cannot speak for ministerial decisions taken at that time. If we are talking about audits of the multilateral system and audits of very complex relationships with countries like China, I will say something very unpopular on the Parliamentary Estate. I think that some of those should not be published. If you want a system to proceed on that basis, some of those national security issues, if they have national security implications, do not always need to be pored over at a parliamentary level. At this point, I might risk getting myself escorted off the property, so I will stop there.
The Chair: Well, we will just note that comment. Lord Ahmad has the next question.
Q102 Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon: It is good to see you again. We have worked on many things together. Taking you through some of the responses you have given already, John, the UK often faced the desire of non-western powers within the multilateral system, the classic almost annual event we used to have, about widening the membership of the UN Security Council, churning out the usual statements, and nothing would change. Of the five permanent members, certainly we were more inclined to give up the veto but others would not. They want more power within multilateral systems. We had the fight over the head of the Commonwealth with His Majesty finally, after much diplomacy, being agreed as the next head of the Commonwealth. How do you think that is playing out? We have seen more recently the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation conference going on right now with world leaders attending. We have seen new associations and alliances being built in the Middle East. I followed very closely the Mecca agreement signed between Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan on regional stability. What is your perspective there on how these non-western states are looking at international institutions and multilateral institutions and their place within them?
Professor John Bew: Thank you, Lord Ahmad. It was a great pleasure working with you—I think probably more my pleasure than yours because of the number of anxious and difficult relationships and conversations that you managed in a period when No. 10 buzzes around and focuses on a certain set of key relationships, often elbowing out critical partners and others around the world. It was hugely useful and, by the way, a very good example of the Foreign Office and No. 10 working very well together.
The broader picture, these different pockets of international activity, is an important question. Truth be told, I think that you described something that we have tried to do but I would argue we need to do a little bit more. I have referred already to coalitions of the willing or like-minded groupings. I think that a sub-threshold international order is being created by a series of alliances and relationships in other parts of the world.
I will give one example that I think fits with the example you have described, which is the Abraham Accords. This happened at the end of the Trump Administration and the Biden Administration was initially cautious, in particular about US-Saudi relations for lots of well documented reasons around the Khashoggi case and otherwise but by the 7 October attacks, I think—and again I do not want to put words in the mouths of American friends and colleagues—perhaps wished they had invested a little bit more in the Abraham Accords as a stabilising multi-state framework that sat outside multilateral rulings and positions. It was a source of frustration to me in No. 10 that I thought we were a bit too quiescent and cautious about interposing ourselves more in the room when it came to the Abraham Accords.
If you think about the Abraham Accords, they do not fit with a nice neat picture of British multilateralism. I have already talked about officials running around with pieces of paper, very well-prepared Ministers having good, highly professional people in these organisations in Geneva and New York, impressive and skilled ambassadors, but this was a different diplomacy. The Abraham Accords was done in hotels in New York, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Jerusalem and elsewhere by people who were often not traditional diplomats but who were very tightly connected to the US Administration and elsewhere. I thought we were a little bit slow on the uptake with our own involvement in those areas, and it is quite uncomfortable for us. That is one example.
Another more positive example is the issue of AI security and AI safety. This is very much a bipartisan point but it started under the Rishi Sunak Government where we did a skilled job in bringing together a coalition of key nations that were up for a sensible, not overly burdensome regulatory conversation about AI security. We changed the name from safety to security to make sure it was not seen as an overly burdensome attempt at regulation because you would put off key decision-makers elsewhere. One crucial facet of that, where again I think that No. 10 was slightly ahead of the Foreign Office, was to build the social, political and, most importantly, economic capital behind a venture like that. You had to engage directly with the leadership of the frontier labs and tech companies, which is not in the natural habit of the Foreign Office to do. It has this wonderful, highly professional network and it is extremely skilled with these organisations, but you have these new casts of characters. In a way you can go back in history and say that this is not unprecedented, the way that people like Ford or Carnegie or Rockefeller in the US in previous times had to be brought into questions about the making of American order through Bretton Woods and elsewhere and became protagonists themselves.
Those are two areas where I would recommend the UK to do some sharper thinking about how we engage in those places. By the way, the leaderships of those frontier labs and elsewhere are looking for conversant nation states that appreciate and understand that they do not want to be regulated out of existence but they are also looking for and yearning for—you can see the bat light going up from these companies in a series of essays; I refer you to Demis Hassabis’s essay a few weeks ago—a smart regulatory regime for some of these security issues. In those two respects where business interests collide with princes in hotels and, secondly, when you are dealing with big tech companies and massive issues of finance and intellectual capital that sit outside the diplomatic process, I think that we are a little bit less impressive. For good reasons, we are quite goody two-shoes when it comes to these processes, but we are not living in a goody two-shoes world right now and we have to think more creatively about how we engage in that.
Q103 Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon: I agree with you, and I think that the issue of relationships was very clear as well—the ability to pick up and break through some of the bureaucracy. One minor add-on is you have talked about this new approach to refresh the traditions that we have and you have talked to some of the traditions. How do you break through those?
Professor John Bew: Some of it comes issue by issue. As an historian but also from the lived reality of my time in government, so much of this depends on political leadership. The great thing about these reports is that they engage directly with the policy process. You put poor civil servants up here and they have to write these letters signed off by Ministers saying they have taken sight of these committees. Some of this is not for No. 10 or Ministers to engage in directly. They would assume that the system should be working well and that the Permanent Under-Secretary would have a good grasp of how resource is apportioned and they would assume that their ambassadors in those key areas, which is often the case, are skilled at building the relationships. Some of it is about political leadership. In the case of Rishi Sunak and AI security, he had a feel and an understanding for the subject and therefore a broader and wider network. No. 10 is a very powerful building when used correctly and people appreciated being engaged in that building and at that level. That is one answer to it.
Some of it is about intellectual curiosity and the incentives for civil servants to have a broader network. If you did a pie chart of relative investment in HR and legal services versus strategic education in 1945 through to today’s Foreign Office, you would see that there has been a massive ballooning in HR and legal services, the responsibilities that senior managers have to run good, happy teams. All that in some ways is welcome, but there has therefore been a concertina and a squeezing of the types of relationships that the great diplomats of the 1940s and 1950s would have; Gladwyn Jebb who would sit with Henry Kissinger in Bellagio for a week and come back home. The networks have been squeezed a little bit because of the incentive and the time to have a broader network.
Opening up a bit of outside-inside connectivity is a welcome thing and I think that the British Government have done better with that. In my experience, very importantly the Foreign Office is not a closed shop. It is very engaged and interested in outside ideas, but some of the people who are best at seeking them are less incentivised in building a broader network. We are hyper-cautious, for good reasons, about probity issues and elsewhere, but we should be far better about bringing people in.
This is a real American comparative advantage. The advantage of our system is that we do not have these big pendulum swings and we have longer institutional memory. The advantage of the American system is that they are able to bring in—it is an accursed phrase but a useful one—the best and the brightest, people who have had the chance to ponder, build their networks and come back in. I would not swap our system for the American one, but I think that we could do some rebalancing and recalibration. It is political leadership and a greater intellectual openness and better networks.
The Chair: You personified that, presumably?
Professor John Bew: Probably badly, but thank you, Lord Robertson.
The Chair: Lord Grocott will do a follow-up.
Q104 Lord Grocott: Yes, it is very much on a similar theme but it is about—I will use the phrase—the Global South, which I know has all sorts of different definitions. I think that we could all agree that the growth of those countries outside the traditional great powers is inexorable. They have become richer, more powerful and will increasingly demand places at the top tables. As far as a number of countries in the Global South are concerned, they will become increasingly important but they are not, to put it mildly, automatically aligning themselves with the interests of the West and of Britain in particular.
One of the comments that has stuck with me from some of the notes that we have had over the last few months is that, for many of these countries, on the divisive conflicts that exist in the world—notably, Ukraine on one side and Gaza on the other—and the whole issue of territorial integrity, which is pretty important in international relations, the West is often accused of having double standards. When Russia annexes parts of a neighbouring country, all sorts of sanctions come into play, quite correctly. When Israel annexes parts of Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank and the list goes on, very different standards of criticism seem to apply. I would like you to reflect on that, whether that is a justified view from the Global South or similar states or not, and whether there is anything we could or should be doing about that.
Professor John Bew: There is lots to do. I think that you advertised this in your opening remark, which is that there is a lot of uncertainty about the value of the phrase “Global South”. Let me just start with that. I am in the camp of those who think it is a problematic term. In fact, if you look at the history of it, it was adopted in the 1970s and 1980s in an entirely unhelpful and rather simplified way to describe those who are recipients of development aid. It is a problematic term. Sometimes as an academic I am probably too interested in the terminology and the poor officials working in different parts of government were perhaps a bit impatient with my overzealous interest in that. If you take “rules-based international system” and the “Global South”, they are terms that too readily are associated with sloppy thinking, and this gets into your very precise question about what follows thereafter. They are countries with a whole set—an obvious point—of different, divergent interests.
I will make another point, which is an historical one. If you were to take the temperature at any stage of the Cold War, a particular sensitive moment, say the early 1970s, those two allegations—one is western hypocrisy and the second is double standards—were there and ever present. You had a vast and important non-aligned movement, of which India was a critical country. India, of course, is a different beast right now and is pretty significant in this firmament as well.
However, you raise an important issue, which is that these are countries with a vote. Their vote in the existing system is perhaps not as powerful in technical terms as they think it should be, but they have a vote in a whole range of other areas as well. Take the Gulf states, which are always a vexed issue in UK foreign policy, where I think that the No. 10 view is almost always certainly we are not spending enough time and the Foreign Office view is always certainly that No. 10 needs to spend time on these issues. These are countries that are vastly important to our future on energy, energy security, direct investment and then they have had interests in the Premier League, our football clubs and so on. These are vastly important countries that are very different to, say, Nigeria, which is hugely vastly growing in population and economic wealth, which has convergent issues of foreign interest.
How you would approach these things is a good question. I would not approach these countries under the bracket of the “Global South” through the multilateral system necessarily, for which the conveyance of their position is often messy and they rarely agree on a number of issues. I would approach them bilaterally. My priority in foreign policy terms would be to manage, invest and think extremely seriously about transatlantic relations, in which I include Europe and the United States. That has to be our immediate priority and then our priority beyond that is in the periphery of the Euro-Atlantic area. That would include the Gulf states, north Africa and Middle East because these are the things that most directly affect us in immediate security terms.
After that, in an area of limited priority, I would be focusing on what is referred to in the UK national security strategy as almost “chain countries”. Those are advanced industrial manufacturing countries, and some of them share our values and political systems; some of them do not, in perfect synchronicity. I would unsentimentally focus on relationships with those countries that have the best handle on technology and advanced manufacturing and that are serious defence players and serious economies. Those are not necessarily geographical, but it takes you in particular to the Gulf states and the Indo-Pacific. Countries like South Korea will become critically important. Look at the amount of spending on defence or data centres. They are investing deeply in the technology of the future. Another one that does not have a similar political system to us, but has a very different political system to us, is Singapore and countries like that—countries that are hot when it comes to economic heft, power and trade.
I would be investing in those, and that is quite a significant reorientation from the 1990s. It is a reflection of the fact that we are not simply bestowing development money to make people look more like us with their economic models. We are behind in a number of critical areas and we need to benefit from these bilateral and other ties, access to technology, access in particular to defence technology, artificial intelligence and in all the supporting things that allow us to grow for the future, including critical minerals, chips, broader supply chains, IP, all these different things.
I think that where the country is right now we cannot be in a position where we are simply bestowing our beneficence. We have to use the relationships to expedite things like university research, investment flows and so on. That is how I would put it: transatlantic first, the perimeter of our Euro-Atlantic area and then into these other countries. By the way, that is a different role for us than being good multilateralist leaders in international development. That is actually a more humble role, but it is a necessary one.
Lord Grocott: On the specific issue of territorial integrity, can you tell us from either a Foreign Office perspective, a foreign affairs within No. 10 perspective or an academic perspective: is that an important principle and is it one we try to apply? How does that relate to what is going on in, say, the Middle East and Ukraine at the moment?
Professor John Bew: It is an important principle and it is one of the reasons why, if you take the UN General Assembly, the support for Ukraine has been pretty solid. It is the most inviolable of all those principles. One of the themes of this committee’s work and one of the themes of what I have said is that the order bequeathed to us in 1945 is in many ways atrophying or being renegotiated actively, sometimes by hostile states, sometimes by our own allies. In the core principles of the UN charter, the most important and the most valuable to all these states is, of course, the question of territorial integrity. Now, that does not solve every single problem in international affairs, but it does explain why “Global South” solidity when it comes to Ukraine has been better than one might actively have presumed.
That fundamental UN charter proposition is very important. Where it becomes more foggy and messy is in areas when, for example, there is a mobilisation around British former colonial possessions. There is a lot of international interest, legal pressure and activism around issues like Chagos as well. You need to separate those core things out from the core fundamental UN principle and then this activism in these other areas where the UK in some respects has to put a hard hat on when it comes to core strategic interests as well.
Q105 Baroness Prashar: Can we talk a little bit about the so-called liberal elements of multilateralism? To what extent do you think that values such as human rights, promotion of democracy and others are still relevant, given that we are in a very turmoil state and we see some backsliding on democracy and so on? Do you think that we should still be pursuing these values?
Professor John Bew: The proof of the pudding is in the eating, so to what extent do they matter, and I have given you a couple of examples. In my lived experience, they matter extremely to Ministers who have to stand at the Dispatch Box, face constituents and do media rounds, and they matter when they are threatened and challenged.
I was really struck—it happened relatively early in my time in No. 10—on the UK response when it came to the basic law in Hong Kong, and the fact that the UK immediately offered up this channel for migration for BNOs, British national (overseas), as well, which was taken up by over 100,000—I do not remember the exact number. Very visible immediate terms, Ministers understanding precisely that they had this sense of their own responsibility to act when it came to values and democracy. It is a very tangible example.
Another example would be the response over Ukraine—this goes to the previous question as well—which was a flagrant violation of the UN charter. Importantly for Ministers, and this is critical, polling in the UK confirmed just how important that sense of support for Ukraine was, and we would track that polling quite extensively. I cannot remember every single digit, but I do remember that, for the first year of the war, a pretty steady 70%-plus of UK citizens polled by the national security secretariat and elsewhere were basically in favour of more support for Ukraine, even if it meant more cost at home when it came to energy bill sanctions and elsewhere.
We live in a democracy that is sometimes rowdy and noisy. Those values are fundamental to how the thing is conducted. There is a separate set of questions as to how and what values you prioritise. It is quite noticeable in looking at the manifestos of both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party that they are focused on women and girls, and women and girls’ education is a recurrent motif in the prioritisation of our aid budget. I have given an example of values that were confronted at moments of crises when you have values choices. Then there is programmatic money as to what you might invest in as well in the midst of it. Those things are very important.
Again, I look at this as a historian. What is harder to argue—and this is quite important because you also have other responsibilities to the taxpayer and elsewhere—is this natural synchronicity between our values and our interests. That was an assumption that we were very clear about at the end of the Cold War. Our values and interests were the same. This was in every ministerial speech. It was the logic of what we did abroad as well. That is sometimes harder to argue because, to protect and promote the values that you might have, along the piece you have to be at the table. I would be one of the people who have argued, in terms of the emphasis you put on foreign policy, that we have to be far more brutally realistic about the things that get us at the table.
We are unable to sustain, by the way, defence spending or overseas development spend unless we are delivering for the British people at home. Those two ideas have to co-exist in the mind of any Government and in the mind of any foreign ministry as well. I would be reluctant about drawing too stark a line between them. However, I think that an era in which we can merrily promote our values in all these forums has gone. We are in a much more ferocious period of trade-offs and risks and doing things to get ourselves a seat at the table and keep the wolf from the door in a number of other areas. That has to be our priority focus.
To give you one final example to finish on, the amount of time in NSC or ministerial meetings spent on values versus hard security choices unquestionably in my time in government shifted more to the latter, the hard security choices. That is probably appropriate. The emphasis will never die and you will face trade-offs. People do not like trade-offs, but those trade-offs will have to come.
The Chair: Trade-offs are the currency of the moment; there is no doubt about that. Lord Bruce has a question.
Q106 Lord Bruce of Bennachie: Thank you for your insights into how the thinking moves around in the Foreign Office. I am just concerned that the debate seems to be accepting somehow or other that the world is now dominated by two competing great powers and we are all having to dance around them. I wonder whether, in fact, that has to be the way it is. After all, most of the world do not live in either of those places and there are emerging countries and there are a lot of different dynamics. The suggestion has been that, whether you want to call them middle powers—and there is a debate about whether the UK is a middle power or a less than great power, which is not very relevant—a whole range of countries are being pushed around potentially by the competition between China and the United States and that they either all fall apart because they cannot agree or they find a way of coming together.
My question is: to what extent is there practical co-ordination, even if it is a moving scenario rather than one that has a secretariat? Is British diplomatic capacity—and I mean across government, not just in the FCDO—big enough or effective enough to manage that if we think it is worth doing?
Professor John Bew: It is a great question. It starts with the proposition as to whether we have to accept a world that is just dominated by the US and China. I think that in some domains we have to be pretty cold-eyed about that reality. I gave you one, which is around artificial intelligence, where just in terms of market share, intellectual capital, research, energy, control of supply chains, innovation expertise and capital flows, the US and China are so far ahead of the rest of us and the dynamic is one of extremely sharp competition.
Probably a useful metric for me as an academic is published research papers on artificial intelligence, where China has had a very good 18 months outstripping a number of American institutions. If you take the US and China, we are talking between 80% and 90% of research and innovation power in artificial intelligence. If you believe artificial intelligence will have an outsized vision in our future, you have to adapt to that core reality. By the way, the UK is an honourable third, I think, in a number of those metrics but with a tiny portion of what is happening.
If you take other metrics—say, share of global trade—as I have mentioned already at the start of the session, global trade is only 15% of American GDP, partly because of energy independence and its internal market. There is a hell of a lot more to play for than US/China. I would also argue that, in terms of NATO and American allies stepping up quite considerably in collective agreement, there is a lot of that as well. That is a large portion of international defence. We do not have to live in a world where we are accepting that bifurcation. We are living in a world where we have to confront the realities of that bifurcation in a number of areas, and that requires choices.
Then, precisely on the middle powers concept, which is famously associated with Mark Carney, I can see why it appeals. I thought that it was a deft speech that he gave at Davos, a very political speech, by the way, but one that attracted a lot of academics. I am not particularly convinced that the middle power proposition should be the priority focus of UK foreign policy. I have already argued that I think we should spend a lot of time thinking about our Euro-Atlantic transatlantic relations because everything is up for renegotiation. We are in the midst of a great renegotiation and I think that is where our priority effort should be. There is trade-off every single day on those. You will see that as this current Government begin to get a feel as to what a close relationship with Europe looks like, and the trade-offs will collide immediately. The United States is so significant to our security laydown, our intelligence operation and our economic future as well. By the way, that applies to Canada more than anywhere else. That is why that relationship is extremely strained and difficult now in the midst of it.
While I do not think that a middle power approach to the world system is the one that the UK should prize, I do think that we should be investing very hard and very deeply in a series of those relations. It was often the case in and around G7s when we had guest countries, like-minded guest countries, that the Brits, the Japanese, the Canadians, a little bit but less so the Indians and other countries, those who sat outside the large regulatory blocks of the EU, the US, NAFTA—though that is a flexible and expanding concept at the moment—and China, outside those immediate economic systems, would huddle in a bit of an inchoate way. We would huddle and say, “We do not want to be pushed around too much on XYZ issue, so can we have a better coherence on our vital interests?” Yes, I think that we can; we can mobilise that. However, I would not bet the house on the Carney version. I would be cautious about that. I do not think that Carney is really betting the house on the Carney version as well. I do not think that Canada will end up in the EU, which is one thing being floated at the moment. I think that we would be a bit more careful about the structures of that.
Then, on your final question, do we have the Diplomatic Service built for that? It is under pressure in terms of range and extent. There are too many people in King Charles Street versus those elsewhere in the world. There is constant pressure on things like embassy, estates and elsewhere. If you ask me towards the end of the session to do a bit of blue-sky thinking, in my optimum world you would have 0.7% on international affairs that is outside the defence budget. I would not start with 0.7% on international development. I would be investing deeply in AI security relationships, in enabling better commercial relationships with the countries I have identified, doing things like AI rollout, offering our value-add strength, deploying some of that money back into UK laboratories as well, but also strengthening the Diplomatic Service. I would include things like the British Council in the midst of that as well. If this country is ever rich enough to go back to a 0.7%-type GDP figure, I would completely recast it along the lines of some of the things I have suggested.
Lord Bruce of Bennachie: I think that is very clear and very helpful, and probably another line of inquiry, to be honest.
I have a final comment, though. Is the behaviour of America, in particular, but to some extent China, not creating a different response? You said that you did not think that Canada will join the EU, but this week Mark Carney has specifically said, “We are starting negotiations for closer relations”. There is a general feeling that, due to the way America is behaving, we do need to make these relationships outside America—given that everything is transactional—more organised and more coherent. At least that surely is—
Professor John Bew: The way you described it is perfect: to make these relationships more organised and more coherent. I spent a bit of time in Washington DC at the height of the early tariff wars with the Trump Administration, when a series of countries were set down. If you remember, the UK managed to negotiate itself the first deal outside that and then Japan did also in the midst of it. That was a moment where, just at a very practical level, in Washington and elsewhere, there was a question as to relative levels of coherence. Could key American allies, the most obvious allies—the countries, by the way, which had the least trade deficits and the least objectionable economic practices for the United States—cohere a little bit? Again, lived experience is that we are all stealing each other’s ventilators off the runway, to use that horrible metaphor. I think that a bit of coherence in that respect is important.
I do not want to make any predictions for the US mid-terms; most of the predictions, or the ones I am reading, I am not convinced by. However, should there be a change of Administration—it will not be a Donald Trump Administration, barring some constitutional events that will excite all their energies—if you were to run a theoretical experiment and say it looked like a Democrat Administration was going to take over in the White House, there would be a stampede from European capitals to find the best relationship with that White House. I was in one of those stampedes beforehand, when the first Trump Administration went to the Biden Administration. In a stampede, those European capitals and Asian capitals were clambering over each other’s heads to have the best possible relationship with the United States. We have to also live with that reality as well.
Sometimes we are looking for a new theory of the world and we are looking sometimes to reinstate the old religions because in international affairs we regard the importance of civility and engagement as good things and keeping that going as a good thing. However, we cannot just bring our rolled-up scrolls and parchments to what is actually a knife fight renegotiation as well. We have to really sweat those personal relationships, and see UK value add, as I say, because in periods where the established road tracks of policy are in place and everyone accepts the core propositions, then Britain is very effective at running the system, running the processes, investing sufficiently. We are less effective when there is a sinkhole in the ground or when the train tracks have been completely disrupted and finding another way to get to the ultimate destination. The ultimate destination in all this is to deliver more effectively for UK interests and the British people at home.
The Chair: Thank you very much. Out of the darkness comes the voice of the professional diplomat: Lord Darroch has a question.
Q107 Lord Darroch of Kew: Out of the darkness—actually, it is quite light here at least.
John, you have talked very eloquently and you have written a lot as well in your excellent New Statesman columns, of which I am a student, about the dramatic changes in the international landscape over the last decade or so. Part of those changes, as we have been discussing, has been the relative decline of the influence and effectiveness of some of the big post-war international organisations. You particularly think of the UN and how little the UN Secretary-General now is involved in the great challenges and crises of the day. The WTO is more or less defunct at the moment. You are a historian with a grasp of the speed of history. Do you think that these changes and the decline of the international structures is essentially irreversible and this is the landscape we must now deal with for the foreseeable future and just accept that is the reality?
In which case, it has, as you have hinted at, some quite important implications for how we apply our resources. To put it very crudely—this may be a bad example—should we spend more time trying to build coalitions of the willing on the issues we think are most important to British foreign policy and spend rather less time trying, for example, to influence who is the next Secretary-General of the United Nations or who is the next leader of the WTO or whatever? Should we spend more time in this context on building these bilateral relationships with the future key players around the planet rather than putting lots of energy and resources into multilateral institutions?
Professor John Bew: Yes, a little bit, frankly, in terms of areas of orientation and focus. Thank you, Lord Darroch. I kept saying nice things about the British Diplomatic Service because in front of me Lord Darroch appears in these three large screens so I felt very concerned about that. It was a very useful placement; of course, the Foreign Office is excellent at placement when it comes to these fora.
I do a little bit. I gave the example of the Abraham Accords where, because it was not cooked up in UN processes and because it did not happen in the UN buildings in New York or in foreign ministries, I think that we were, in King Charles Street, a little bit culturally predisposed to snort at it. I thought that we should have been far more effective in at least engaging with those realities. I do not think that it has helped our long-term position in the Gulf.
I will give you another example. It is a bracing example, and I gave it to colleagues in a Foreign Office meeting on multilateralism. In my experience at No. 10, if you got the call about a UN Security Council vote—and this is almost six years—from the Foreign Secretary’s private office or elsewhere, it was almost always a problem. It was almost always a political problem or a political challenge. It was very rarely, “Can you make a few calls to push something over the line? We are going to have an effect”. It also felt like a posture in a number of areas. We had a lot of controversial votes post 7 October, for example. We have a convention on Middle East issues to only vote once removed from the Americans. We rarely had the UN coming back with solutions.
Let me also say, Lord Darroch—your presence has reminded me—that we have a very new and effective ambassador in the United Nations, Dame Sarah MacIntosh, who was Deputy National Security Adviser for a lot of the time when I was in government and understands these challenges very well. I think that the answer practically to what is to be done is probably both. I do not think that you can afford—this is where I am going against my trade-offs—but the relative price of having people present, highly professional, well-trained people, versus having large swathes of money coming from international development, you have to be present at all these fora where the conversations are happening. I think that is very important. I would not be running down our UN operation for the sake of running after these key allies and partners.
I would be more willing to take risk in a number of areas, in a number of relationships. Let me give you a couple of tangible examples. We did a series of deeper relationships in 2019, really from 2022 to 2024-25, with a series of different countries—South Korea being an example, Japan being another. We offered bridging security guarantees to Sweden and Finland ahead of NATO accession. In my experience, while you had very willing, very creative officials, often our ambassadors were the most vanguardist when it came to making suggestions of what we should do with those relationships. There was often always an institutional resistance to taking a little bit more risk in those relationships.
I can think of one tangible example when we agreed a reciprocal access agreement with the Japanese, which is modelled on what the Australians have with the Japanese, just deepening our defence and security ties ahead of, by the way, a massive inward investment and deeper economic relationships as well. There was always some resistance to taking those risks, to going deeper in security arrangements, to doing things that sat outside the multilateral system. There was always an institutional reason to say no to things like that. That is where we need to blast through a little bit some of the—the truth is that sometimes the job of the Foreign Office was perceived in No. 10 as to say, “Here is why this is too complicated”.
That was not always the case. I would give a hat tip in particular to ambassadors who are the ones sometimes ignoring King Charles Street and coming straight to No. 10 via WhatsApp and saying, “We need to do XYZ and, by the way, I know who is coming through town, from the business community or the defence community, and I know what deals are afoot when it comes to F-35s and Typhoons”. Just a little bit more of that rigour, I think, and risk-taking is probably the best way to blow through the cobwebs. Again, to do that, then Ministers have to take choices and officials will surely write them on the page and say, “Here are the risks”, so a bit of risk has to be built in.
An area where we did do risk and we went ahead of the pack is Ukraine. On almost every single capability, when it came to lethal aid weaponry right through to today, we have taken risks across that piece, too, because we thought others were too slow and cumbersome. Sometimes the habit is to stick with the pack and to be more ambient and more tinkering. I think that there is a role for the UK to play as a bit of a vanguard on some subjects, not all.
Lord Darroch of Kew: I agree very much with all that, especially your thoughts on risk. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you so much, Professor Bew. You have given us a real object lesson here as well. It has been profoundly useful to our study, and we are very grateful to you for your time. Thank you very much.