George Grant: Is Britain's Decline and Fall Unavoidable?
George Grant is the Director for Global Security at The Henry Jackson Society and co-author with Bernard Jenkin MP of The Tipping Point: British National Strategy and the UK’s Future World Role, released in July 2011.
The United Kingdom in 2011 is at a strategic tipping point. We have to decide whether we wish to remain a global power, with a global role, or whether we are to accept the supposedly inevitable and decline to the status of a middling European power with only a regional one.
Many believe that the UK has already arrived at the latter destination. They are wrong. In spite of our small size, the UK retains a number of significant comparative advantages over other medium-sized states that continue to afford us a unique and important place in the modern world. These include the status of English as the global language of business and diplomacy, our permanent seat on the UN Security Council, the international predominance of English common law and the unique set of diplomatic and trading relationships afforded by the Commonwealth. We remain a highly innovative and prosperous nation, the world's tenth largest exporter and sixth largest importer, and London is still the world's most important financial centre.
Necessarily consistent with this status, we have also remained one of just a handful of countries with the capacity to project influence, including military influence where required, anywhere in the world.
Today, however, this position is in very real danger...