Liz Truss travels to Scotland on Tuesday to formalise her accession to Downing Street with Queen Elizabeth II. Hawkishness on Russia and China characterises the next British PM’s foreign policy agenda – but so does hawkishness with the EU over the Brexit deal’s Northern Ireland Protocol. Truss now faces a formidable challenge in preserving Britain’s credibility to make it a leading player in the geopolitical contests with Russia and China, seeing as she plans to break an international agreement with its European partners.
The pre-eminent figure in the Tory leadership contest was not Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak or even Boris Johnson, but Margaret Thatcher. There was a vexed economic debate over the competing merits of different incarnations of Mrs Thatcher at various points in her premiership. But Truss’s archetypally Thatcherite, Cold Warrior approach to great power competition was far less contentious, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed Western naïveté about Moscow’s revanchism.
