Boris Johnson Wants to Make British Imperialism Great Again
Boris Johnson wants the UK to spend more on arms and reassert its "global role." Along with a government clampdown on anti-racist organizing, his strategy is clear — imperial grandstanding and the crushing of dissent.
People wave as the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth leaves Portsmouth Naval Base as it sets sail for flight trials. (Andrew Matthews/PA Images via Getty Images)
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Integrated Defence and Security Review (IDSR), leaked in March, has been crowded out of recent British political debate. Often, we have been rather more preoccupied by government proposals to ban protests that cause “annoyance,” or its decision to give nurses who’ve battled the pandemic a paltry £3.50-a-week pay raise.
But IDSR deserves more attention — and it’s more than just a matter of defense spending. This is a stimulus program that aims to divert the country’s productive capacity to a sophisticated new war machine — and shore up Johnson’s fragile domestic coalition by using that machine to grandstand on the world stage. It forms the nucleus of a grand plan to reshape Britain and the world in Johnson’s image.
The Men Who Would Be Kings
Boris Johnson’s political divining rods appear to be Winston Churchill, Roman statecraft, and vast white elephants. He has assembled a court of mavericks with similarly grandiose visions. The IDSR is part of a Global Britain agenda being fashioned by historian John Bew. Bew is no committed Tory; he is broadly center-left, albeit a firm warmonger internationalist. He also directs the King’s College London Centre for Grand Strategy, concerned with no less than why states succeed or fail. His appointment bears similarities to Johnson’s erstwhile controversy-courting aide Dominic Cummings, also a non-devout Tory with an idiosyncratic worldview belying a technocratic centrist approach. Both are preoccupied with the work of military thinkers from Clausewitz to Boyd, and fixated on subordinating everyday politics to ambitious future-craft. The IDSR gives shape and structure to these dreams.
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