China and the commonwealth: another foreign policy failure? | thearticle

Hands up who knows exactly where the Solomon Isles are located, how many islands there are, what is the name of the capital, what is the population, whether they are members of the

Commonwealth, whether the Queen is their head of state (answer, yes) and if so, who is the Governor-General? The Chinese know all these things, and a lot more. So does a body called Chinese

Sam Enterprise Group, which describes itself a as “state-level company” and is bidding, not for the first time, for a lease to build a Chinese military and naval base in the islands. This

Group knows that they are increasingly welcome there these days, especially when they offer a variety of financial support, infrastructure support, technological support and training, all

thrown in. Why should this far-away development worry anyone in London? After all the pattern is not new. The Chinese have made a point of being involved in numerous island states, both in

South-East Asia and in the Caribbean, as well as in numerous larger states throughout Africa and the Indian sub-continent, many of them Commonwealth members. The latest figure is that 38

Commonwealth countries (out of 54), mostly coastal or insular, have Belt-and-Road MOUs or a Double Taxation Agreements with China. Not a bad score for Beijing. But now, as in the Solomons,

the involvement is fast going well beyond trade and loans, into military linkages, including officer training, weapons supply and now actual bases. The military and security flavour of

Chinese interest is growing . For example, currently China is offering its African friendly “client” states 5,000 places at its military training establishments in and near Beijing. Officer

training for Commonwealth countries used to be a strictly British affair, via Sandhurst at Camberley. But now a very different kind of “Sandhurst” in Beijing is taking the lead. None of this

until recently, if even now, seems to have troubled our foreign policy strategists in London, the view being that if Chinese money and technology can help lift development faster in these

nations from extremely low income levels, that’s OK. Anyway, who’s to stop them? Indeed, the Chinese incursions become quite unpopular at times, with their rather crude, and frankly

neo-colonialist methods, so it will all sort itself out. While the Commonwealth is a “good thing” and has been a creditable way of bringing the imperial age to an end, it really all belongs

to the past and many of these islands are not only independent but too remote, and small, to be of any great strategic value, while the bigger member states are “not really interested”. But

that, of course, is just the reason why worry about the intensity of spreading Chinese interest should be at the top of the list, not the bottom – because it is a pattern and a rapidly

spreading one. Furthermore, it is changing in character. The Chinese have grasped what too many British experts seem to have missed – that these “remote” countries, far from being of low

strategic value, are becoming key links in a strategic chain of profound importance and potential. There are two key reasons for this, both pretty obvious and again not all that new or

surprising. The first is a consequence of the 1992 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which affirmed for every nation, large or small, the sovereign rights to all natural resources over a

200 nautical mile surrounding continental “shelf”, even if in reality there was only deep water and an actual shelf didn’t exist. These maritime zone rights were further enforced by UNCLOS

1997 (when the UK joined as the 119th acceding power). At a stroke the free and open seas became pockmarked with countless zones where standards of the nearby state had to be carefully

observed and often navigating permissions to pass had to be sought — or could be denied. The other big change is the drone. Air bases require big runways and facilities, just too large for

the smallest landmasses. Drone operations, even on a large scale, do not. As a result of these two factors alone, small islands round the world have become strategically very interesting

indeed, despite cavalier Whitehall indifference (matched by equal State Department indifference). For China it has been quite different. The character of Chinese involvement is changing

fast, and being stepped up in all regions and on all continents. Aside from building their own controversial new islands in the South China Seas the Chinese are to be found embedded in

archipelagos, islands and coastal states just about everywhere. In Canberra, much closer to the many islands of the South Seas, the view is also rather different to Whitehall’s lack of

interest. Australians feel they have got too much “China” anyway and have been thoroughly alarmed at Chinese incursion into Vanuatu, where they are building a very substantial port and

airport development. From Canberra an ugly trend can be seen a lot clearer than from Whitehall – namely that chains of states and islands across the globe which ought long ago to have been

nurtured as parts of a containment pattern against Chinese expansionism, and authoritarianism generally, are being turned on their heads. Instead of containing the spread of Chinese power,

they are becoming its spearheads. A tapestry is being woven of connections from Beijing of all sorts, commercial, financial and security-linked, skilfully binding nations and societies

across the planet into the Chinese orbit. That this is being allowed to happen, and Britain’s best transmission system of influence and mutual security across the world allowed to

disintegrate, must rank as one of the major foreign policy failures of modern times. While official minds, and advice to ministers, remain stuck in the “spheres of influence” age, with its

Manichean undertones of East versus West and the clash of civilisations, the UK is surrendering its best chance of rising above the herd of jostling nationalisms which now dominate the

planet. That chance was to embed itself in the Commonwealth network of like-minded states who favoured the rule of law and who fostered democratic forms of varying kinds (not necessarily

Westminster models). The price of failing to do so is not just widening Chinese influence. A deplorable consequence right now is to see many Commonwealth countries (over half in population

terms) refuse to condemn, or act against, unbearable Russian atrocities in Ukraine. Letting that state of affairs come about, instead of ensuring that signatories to the Commonwealth Charter

at least understood the impossibility of “neutrality” in the face of such evil, is high diplomatic negligence. The roots of this appalling neglect lie in a whole UK diplomatic generation’s

inability to see, and shape, foreign relations in a holistic way in the digital age. This should have meant appreciating from the start the huge transforming power of connectivity, of

identity pressures, of information flows and complete immediacy on the behavioural patterns between nations. The mindset essential to comprehend the new order of things has just not occurred

at senior levels – whether in London or other European capitals, and especially not in Washington, where 20th century visions of leadership, rival “spheres of influence” and a return to US

“primacy” prevail right across the political spectrum. What has been missed again and again, using the language of the American polymath Anne-Marie Slaughter, is that international relations

have moved from the chessboard to the web. We are now in a network world in which all the hierarchical patterns of past power and command are melting, with their associated alliances and

treaty bases, and a myriad of new linkages and types of influence replacing them. One explanation, or it might even be seen as an excuse, for this official myopia about what is happening

could be that so many of the new connecting threads lie outside government’s reach. Making decisions or taking initiatives when not in control of all the levers, or when there is no

intergovernmental treaty to be negotiated and tied up, encourages a shrug of the shoulders and interest moving elsewhere. Going one layer deeper, one might say that the deficiency is in

understanding the nature of “control” in changed international conditions. There was vivid evidence of this in the Brexit debate, where the phrase “take back control” was deemed to have such

appeal. The realisation has long since dawned, or ought to have done, that in the network world this was a twisted and meaningless slogan, bearing little relation to reality — a phrase that

could only have come from narrow and immature minds. Other reasons there probably were, and are, for challenging the outdated and over-centralised EU model and instead getting on with

designing modern relationships with European neighbours, but this one, seen as so central, was bogosity from the start and remains so. International institutions to which Britain is bound by

treaty agreement, and in many cases by international law – and thereby becoming binding on British citizens – have multiplied apace in the network age. For the world as a whole the Union of

International Organisations estimates that there were 242 such institutions in 1971 and fifteen times as many by 2012. They have doubled in number since then. Not all involved treaties, or

legislation to bring them into domestic law, but many did. Hugging to something labelled “national control’”or “control regained” in these circumstances is a prize rhetorical deceit. There

is evidence of the same intellectually frozen thinking at work in the current obsession with so-called “national energy security”. A modern nation’s energy security, whatever stage is

reached in energy transformation to lower carbon sources, can only, and always will only, exist, in an elaborate international weave of cooperation and mutual assistance, and an unbroken

flow of minerals, materials, components and technological software and knowhow, to which the national energy system must remain firmly plugged in. No wind pylon can be constructed without a

string of imported parts and materials. No rising climate violence can be staved off by individual national strategies. Back-up from diverse energy sources, primary and secondary, when the

wind does not blow, interconnectors from other countries, a world-wide lattice of nuclear connections, in which an accident anywhere affects everywhere — all these basic factors make

“control” through a neatly tied-up and secure energy supply autarchy not only wildly expensive, unreliable and uneconomic, but in fact an impractical and impossible dream, as well as highly

inimical to a decarbonised world. Across the Commonwealth network, touching almost all continents, British influence has been allowed to become weakest where it should have been strongest.

This should have been exerted, not through formal alliances, treaty agreements or post-colonial largesse and lectures, but through constant and mutually respectful dialogue with like-minded

friends and partners, large and small, all with their own pride, their own struggles and their own ambitions, unlocked by new technology. Security, immediate energy costs and the now

apparent need for whole new climate strategies world-wide should all have been constantly on the agenda. Working in new ways with them, as numerous Chinese companies, thinly disguised agents

of the Chinese state, are now busily doing, should have long ago been, and must now become, a top priority for the UK. Until that message begins to sink in, the key advantages Britain has

in the entirely changed world order, will continue to be rapidly frittered away. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an

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