Tobias Ellwood, Conservative chair of the Commons defence committee said after the Afghan debacle “We should be clear that Britain’s leverage is negligible as an individual country”…”The only means of influence we now have is if we pool efforts together with the international community”
Quite right. Perhaps he should let his boss know that right next door there’s a club that makes up one of the top-3 economies in the world and hosts the world’s second largest reserve currency. It’s the most populous democratic group in the world, and has firm stuff about democracy and the Rule of Law written into its core: nothing to be ashamed of.
If the global influence game is of interest this club is of note. It focuses on soft power, with fourteen times more diplomatic missions than us, indeed four times more than UK, US and China together. It avoids hard power, but still has a combined military budget only slightly smaller than China’s, each being one third of the USA’s. Each of those is four or five times ours.
If we want influence we could join a club like that. We’d pack a much bigger punch. That’s not their raison d’être however, they’re principally there for a myriad of other things, so the other benefits to us would be enormous. You could tell your boss, Tobias. You could.
Ah, Tobias Ellwood. Let’s see your CV… Hmm, maybe you were.