Even amid the mounting rhetoric over the Russia-Ukraine standoff, Britain’s recent foreign policy “debate” has seemed singularly unhinged. Foreign secretary Liz Truss’s attempts to project the capacity to face down Vladimir Putin collapsed into farce as she misidentified two Russian regions as part of Ukraine — prompting her counterpart Sergei Lavrov to describe the meeting as “like a mute talking to a deaf person.” More risible still has been the posturing of Labour leader Keir Starmer, combining parody-defying saber-rattling with McCarthyite swipes against the antiwar left. There is, he told the BBC’s political editor in a self-important explanation of his antics, “nothing Russia wants more than to see than division in the United Kingdom between the political parties.”

Such theatrical warmongering is so out of joint with the hard realities of multipolarity and ecological breakdown that observing it can almost be considered a form of escapism. One reason for this Westminster derangement is obvious, owing to still-fresh memories of the unwelcome challenge to Atlanticist orthodoxy from 2015 to 2019. The prospect of Jeremy Corbyn becoming prime minister induced a panic that has yet to cease, despite his defeat. In those years, three of the most significant figures in Britain’s antiwar movement ran the Labour Party — threatening, at the very least, to democratize the foreign policy debate and range popular opinion against its prevailing consensus. Starmer’s leadership brought a restoration, which still today marches on.

There is, though another cause of these pathologies in the discourse about Britain’s place in the world: an unspoken intellectual and political crisis facing the Atlanticist worldview. For Labour’s Atlanticists, at least, foreign policy has long been comfortingly simple. Their maxim is one of unthinking deference to the United States, premised on a recognition that Britain’s ability to exercise imperial power rests on its status as a supporting pillar of the American empire. Under New Labour, this junior partnership morphed into total subordination. What, then, is to be done when the global hegemon seems to be in retreat, with its aggressive capacities tempered and constrained?