Britain’s periodic updates to its national defense and foreign-policy posture long ago lost their ability to shape global events. Since 1956 at least, following the Suez crisis and the United Kingdom’s loss of the eponymous canal, the country’s periodic white papers spoke stridently but carried smaller and smaller sticks.
Despite brief episodes such as the 1982 Falklands War and the ultimately disastrous British participation in Iraq in the first decade of this century, British strategy has mostly been about retrenchment and management of post-imperial decline, or, at best, plucky efforts to live up to the nation’s vow to “punch above its weight class,” as British governments have liked to say.
