Scholarly Essay

International Journal

‘East of Suez’ and the ‘Indo-

2023, Vol. 78(3) 345–358
© The Author(s) 2023

Pacific’ in British Politics: Article reuse guidelines:

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Some Lessons of History DOI: 10.1177/00207020231195629
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Nick Pearce
Institute for Policy Research, University of Bath, Bath, UK

Abstract
The idea of a transoceanic ‘Indo-Pacific’ region has a long historical lineage in British
political thought and practice, one whose roots lie in processes of imperial colonisa-
tion, conquest and trade in Asia and Australasia. Recent discourses of a return ‘East of
Suez’ and the UK’s ‘Indo-Pacific Tilt’ cannot be understood as mere imperial nostalgia
or post-imperial over-reach, however. Instead, there are historical political imaginaries
of Britain’s global role which are being put to work in the contemporary politics of
shaping an Indo-Pacific strategy for the UK. British policy in the Indo-Pacific has
been marked by a consistent awareness of multi-polarity and strategic vulnerability,
hierarchies of alliances that give a privileged place to the US and the countries of
the ‘Anglosphere’, and the recurrence of maritime, ‘blue water’ conceptions of
British identity and interests. These are now being tested by the war in Ukraine
and other developments.

Keywords
Indo-Pacific, ‘East of Suez’, Anglosphere, AUKUS, British foreign policy

The idea of a trans-oceanic region called the “Indo-Pacific” has become a signature for
the geopolitical strategy of the US and that of its key partners and allies in Asia and the
Pacific. Its contemporary coinage is particularly associated with the late Japanese
prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who championed the concept of a “free and open

Corresponding author:
Nick Pearce, Institute for Policy Research, University of Bath, 10 West Building, Bath BA2 7AY, UK.
Email: n.pearce@bath.ac.uk
346 International Journal 78(3)

Indo-Pacific” in a number of set-piece foreign policy speeches.1 Subsequently, the idea

of an Indo-Pacific region spanning the Indian Ocean, the central and western Pacific
Ocean, and the seas connecting them was taken up by the US as part of its “Asian
pivot” and strategic reorientation of defence and security policy towards meeting the
challenge of the rise of the People’s Republic of China. It renamed its Pacific
Command the “Indo-Pacific Command” in 2018, released a set of “Indo-Pacific” strat-
egies, and began positioning itself as an “Indo-Pacific power.”2 In recent years, the
nomenclature of the “Indo-Pacific” has been widely deployed in government strategy
documents, from Australia to India, Indonesia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the
United Kingdom, and the European Union.3 It has been aptly described as a “wave
sweeping global diplomacy.”4
Although the term itself appears first to have been used in the Victorian era by
the Singapore-based lawyer and philologist, James Richardson Logan, it found its
most extensive treatment as a geopolitical concept in Karl Haushofer’s voluminous
works of the 1920s and 1930s.5 Haushofer’s work was highly influential for US
foreign policy thinkers in framing global strategy after World War Two, but the
geopolitical construct was left largely in abeyance until resurrected by Abe.6 A
notable exception was the use of “Indo-Pacific” in a set of working papers and
strategy documents assembled by Whitehall officials for the Defence Review
undertaken in the mid-1960s by Harold Wilson’s Labour government. This
review famously led to the withdrawal of British forces stationed “east of Suez”
in the early 1970s, an epochal shift that capped the dismantling of the British
Empire and coincided with the UK’s entry to the European Economic
Community. In recent years, leading British Conservative politicians have
spoken of their regret at this decision and articulated a desire to return to a perma-
nent or “persistent” British presence in Asia and the Pacific. This has been accom-
panied by an “Indo-Pacific tilt” in UK strategy announced in the 2021 Integrated

1. Shinzo Abe, “Realizing a free and open Indo-Pacific,” Project Syndicate, 26 September 2022, https://
www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/realizing-vision-of-free-and-open-indo-pacific-by-abe-shinzo-
2022-09 (accessed 9 January 2023).
2. “Indo-Pacific strategy of the United States,” The White House, Washington, DC, 2022, https://www.
whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/U.S.-Indo-Pacific-Strategy.pdf (accessed 9 January 2023).
3. See, inter alia, “EU strategy for cooperation in the Indo-Pacific,” European Union External Action, 19
April 2021, https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/eu-strategy-cooperation-indo-pacific-0_en (accessed 9
January 2023).
4. Rory Medcalf, Indo-Pacific Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), ix.
5. Ibid., 51; Lewis A. Tambs and Ernst J. Brehm, English Translation and Analysis of Major General Karl
Ernst Haushofer’s Geopolitics of the Pacific Ocean (Lampeter: Edwin Mellin Press, 2002); Hansong Li,
“The ‘Indo-Pacific’: Intellectual origins and international visions in global contexts,” Modern
Intellectual History 19, no. 3 (2021): 1–27.
6. Matthew Specter, The Atlantic Realists (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022).
Pearce 347

Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, and, of course, by

Brexit—the decision to leave the EU.7
The use of the terminology “Indo-Pacific” in the 1960s UK defence review and its
recent revival in debates on the UK’s role in the world after Brexit are suggestive of a
longer historical lineage of the idea of a transoceanic space connecting the Indian and
Pacific oceans in British political thought and practice. Tracing this lineage—one
whose roots lie in the processes of colonisation, conquest, and British imperial trade
in Asia and Australasia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—can
help us better to understand the particularities of the use of the “Indo-Pacific” in con-
temporary British politics and public policy.
For some commentators, Brexit, the return of “east of Suez,” and the “Indo-Pacific
tilt” represent little more than imperial nostalgia and hopelessly inflated projections of
British power in a world of Thucydidean conflict between the US and China. Others
have argued persuasively that post-imperial patterns of thought are not simply the pre-
serve of “Brexiteers” but instead a “common cultural inheritance” widely shared in
British politics, and that Conservative discourses of “Global Britain” represent an
attempt to construct a new, anti-declinist vision of Britain’s place in the world
based, not on imperial greatness, but on an imagined longue durée of a maritime, free-
trading, and “buccaneering” small world island.8 On this reading, there are historical
political imaginaries of Britain’s global role, political traditions of constructing
British alliances and interests, and recurrent motifs and tropes, which are being put
to work in the contemporary politics of shaping an Indo-Pacific strategy for the UK
and which are not simply rehearsals of an imperial hubris. Exploring the histories of
how the Indo-Pacific has been conceived and deployed in British politics can therefore
shed some light on contemporary debates and substantive policy choices.
Although beyond the scope of this paper, there are wider intellectual currents and
disciplinary perspectives to consider when studying the Indo-Pacific in contemporary
international relations. In oceanography and earth sciences, the “Indo-Pacific” refers to
the vast “warm pool” of waters stretching from the equatorial western Pacific to the
eastern Indian Ocean, the world’s warmest body of surface waters and one which is
central to the global climate system. The relationship between the natural and the
social plays a critical part in the history of the Indo-Pacific and will assume increasing
importance as a consequence of accelerating climate change. The oceanic demarcation
of the Indo-Pacific also has important implications for the “mental maps” of the region
used by policymakers, not least in giving maritime inflections to strategic

7. “Global Britain in a competitive age: The integrated review of security, defence, development and
foreign policy,” HM Government, London, 2021, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/global-
britain-in-a-competitive-age-the-integrated-review-of-security-defence-development-and-foreign-
policy (accessed 9 January 2023).
8. Robert Saunders, “Brexit and empire: ‘Global Britain’ and the myth of imperial nostalgia,” The Journal
of Imperial and Commonwealth History 48, no. 6 (2020): 1140–1174. See also Srdjan Vucetic,
Greatness and Decline (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021), 219–220.
348 International Journal 78(3)

conceptions.9 Important perspectives are also supplied by the rise of oceanic histories
and historiographies of particular oceans, postcolonial histories of science and the
Indo-Pacific, and studies of Pacific and Indian ocean histories of trade, migration,
and settlement.10 Insights from these disciplines throw new light on contemporary geo-
political discussions of the Indo-Pacific. In what follows, I also draw on studies of the
“Anglosphere” and its antecedents, which are important to our understanding of the
Indo-Pacific in British politics.11

The Indo-Pacific in British political history

Manjeet S. Pardesi has recently argued that “regions emerge out of the threefold inter-
relationship of politico-military interaction capacity, strategic perceptions of the
regional states, and the perceptions and strategic behaviour of the great powers.”12
For Pardesi, the Indo-Pacific is a distinct and identifiable sub-system within the inter-
national system, one which first emerged around the time of the consolidation of
British imperial power in India at the beginning of the nineteenth century. “Post
1800,” he argues, “all of the major powers of this region—British India, Qing
China, Imperial Japan, and the United States (until the end of the Second World);
and Britain, India, China, and the United States (until the 1960s)—conceived this
region as a singular strategic system and implemented policies accordingly.”13
The idea of a transoceanic space covering and connecting the Indian and Pacific
oceans in British imperial discourses and practices arguably begins with the expedi-
tions of James Cook and the early history of British colonial exploration, mapping,
and settler conquest in the Pacific and Australasia. The critical formative period
came towards the end of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, when
a penal colony was created in New South Wales, and the extension of British power
in India and increasing trade with China by the East India Company led to the
opening up of settlements along the Malay peninsula.14 The British took control of
Singapore in 1819 and established British naval power over key trade routes and mar-
itime passages, having taken over Dutch imperial possessions from the Cape of Good

9. Medcalf, Indo-Pacific Empire.

10. David Abulafia, The Boundless Sea (London: Allen Lane, 2019); David Armitage, Alison Bashford, and
Sujit Sivasundaram, eds., Oceanic Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Sujit
Sivasundaram, Waves Across the South (London: William Collins, 2020); S. Kroupa, S.J. Mawson, and
D. Brixius, “Science and islands in Indo-Pacific worlds,” British Journal of the History of Science 51,
no. 4 (2018): 541–558.
11. Srdjan Vucetic, The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce, Shadows of Empire
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018); Ben Wellings and Andrew Mycock, eds., The Anglosphere:
Continuity, Dissonance and Location (London: Proceedings of the British Academy, 2019).
12. M.S. Pardesi, “The Indo-Pacific: A ‘new’ region or the return of history?,” Australian Journal of
International Affairs 74, no. 2 (2020): 124–146.
13. Ibid., 125.
14. Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Pearce 349

Hope to Ceylon and Malacca during the Napoleonic Wars. In the 1820s the Straits
Settlements were created, and the 1824 Anglo-Dutch Treaty was signed, laying the
foundations for the division of spheres of interest between the imperial powers for
the rest of the century.
The process of British imperial expansion east from India was for the most part mar-
itime. But the vision that the founder of British Singapore, Sir Stamford Raffles, had of
a vast East Indian empire and free trade zone, rid of the “twin evils of Dutch imperi-
alism and oriental misrule” policed by British naval force, did not come to pass.15
Instead, British interests focused on the creation of strategic ports and trading posts,
while turning the Indian Ocean into a British lake. These strategic positions—later
extended to Sarawak, Brunei, and Borneo, and through the South China Sea to
Hong Kong after the Opium Wars—provided the political and economic infrastructure
for British imperial India-China trade. The political economy of this trade is well
known: opium exports from India to China balanced the deficit on imports of tea,
silks, and porcelains. With the later development of “steam globalization,” strategic
ports became vital coaling stations.16
The second half of the nineteenth century saw new developments: direct political
control of India after 1857 and the Straits Settlements from 1867, the opening of the
Suez Canal, imperialist power rivalry over expansion in China and the Pacific,
increased anti-colonial resistance, and the rise of the US and Japan as major Pacific
economic and military powers. In late Victorian British political thought, these devel-
opments were reflected in the emergence of discourses on “world states” and strategic
competition for land mass, population, and security between the great powers, of
which Great Britain, the US, and Russia were considered paradigmatic.17 The historian
J.R. Seeley divided the British Empire into a “Greater Britain” of the “English race” in
Great Britain and the white settler colonies, whose integration into a world state was
considered a geopolitical and civilizational imperative, and the imperium of the
subject colonies and possessions. For high imperialists like George Curzon, viceroy
of India and later foreign secretary, India was the central imperial subject, and the
“Great Game” with Russia was the primary struggle, waged in buffer states of the
Middle East, central Asia, and India’s northwest frontiers. For Seeley, Charles
Dilke, and others, primary importance was attached to the “kith and kin” of the
settler colonies in Australia and New Zealand, and their security within the empire;
for Curzon, it was India that guaranteed British security in the Indo-Pacific, and the
Indian government and its interests were paramount.

15. A.J. Stockwell, “British expansion and rule in South-East Asia,” in Andrew Porter, ed., The Oxford
History of the British Empire, Vol. III, The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
374.
16. John Darwin, Unlocking the World: Port Cities and Globalisation in the Age of Steam (London: Allen
Lane, 2020).
17. Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
350 International Journal 78(3)

In turn, these divisions of empire were reflected in Edwardian debates about sea
versus land power, between Alfred Mahan’s insistence on the primacy of naval
power in world affairs and the importance of the Royal Navy in policing the maritime
routes of imperial trade, and the influential teachings of Harold Mackinder on the
pivotal region of the Eurasian heartland and states’ control, facilitated by modern rail-
ways, over land mass (ideas which were later developed for the Indo-Pacific in
Haushofer’s work and in transatlantic dialogue between the US and German theo-
rists18). They were reflected, too, in Joseph Chamberlain’s project for tariff reform
and imperial preference, which embraced the “kith and kin” white settler colonies
but excluded India. Chamberlain’s “constructive imperialism” registered a key differ-
ence in imperial economics between the colonies of European settlement and else-
where. On the one hand, the nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw
massive increases in migration, capital investment, intensive agriculture, and industrial
manufacturing in the Anglo world of the US and “Greater Britain”; on the other, the
decline of handicraft production and shares of world manufacturing, and increases
in arable farming and primary commodity production, in India and China.19
After the First World War, British naval power went into relative decline, but rising
Japanese economic and military power prompted the British to build a “Gibraltar of the
East” in Singapore—a heavily defended naval base—at vast cost. Singapore, with its
sheltered, deep-water harbour and key location, was an obvious choice for a British
base in the Indo-Pacific, though the expenditure on its construction during the inter-
war economic slump was a major drain on British economic resources. It was the
fall of Singapore in 1942 which first signalled the end of the Indo-Pacific British
Empire and prompted Australia and New Zealand to turn to the US for their protection,
signing the ANZUS pact in 1951. Both countries committed forces to the Korean War,
alongside the main deployments of US and British forces. Britain continued to rely
heavily on trade with the Sterling Area in southeast Asia and Australasia well into
the 1960s, but it had by then long ceded Western leadership in the region to the US.

The end of “east of Suez”

Coming to terms with these realities brought the Indo-Pacific back to the centre of
British strategic thinking after the election of the Labour Government in 1964.
Buffeted by balance-of-payments crises and pressure on the pound sterling, but

18. Specter, The Atlantic Realists. For a classic statement of these sea-versus-land power debates, see Paul
Kennedy, “Mahan versus Mackinder: Two interpretations of British sea power,” in Strategy and
Diplomacy 1870-1945 (London: Fontana, 1984), 41–86. For a critique of the interpretation of Makinder
as a land power theorist, see Louis Halewood, “‘Peace throughout the oceans and seas of the world’:
British maritime strategic thought and world order, 1892–1919,” Historical Research 94, no. 265
(2021): 554–577.
19. James Belich, Replenishing the Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); B.R. Tomlinson,
“Economics and empire: The periphery and the imperial economy” in Porter, ed., The Oxford History of
the British Empire, 53–74.
Pearce 351

committed to spending increases on education and social security, the Wilson admin-
istration sought substantial reductions in defence expenditure. It undertook a lengthy
review of strategic foreign and defence commitments, military procurements, and force
deployments overseas. This eventually culminated in decisions to withdraw from
major British bases in Aden and Singapore, cut troop numbers in Asia, and concentrate
armed forces in continental Europe—a process that was accelerated after the devaluation
of sterling in 1967. Announcing the final programme of cuts and drawdowns to the House
of Commons, Wilson argued that the UK would “make to the alliances of which we are
members a contribution related to our economic capability while recognising that our
security lies fundamentally in Europe and must be based on the North Atlantic
Alliance.” It was, he argued, necessary “to come to terms with our role in the world.”20
Recent academic studies of these decisions have challenged the assumption that
they were driven by the remorseless logic of economic necessity.21 The Labour gov-
ernment chose to cap defence spending, rather than restrain spending on its social
policy ambitions, and within the reduced defence budget, prioritised meeting prior
obligations to NATO partners to station four divisions in western Europe over its
east of Suez commitments. Officials arrived at the central conclusions of the review
relatively quickly in 1965, but the politics of the process were messier and more pro-
tracted—not least because Britain could not pull out of the Indo-Pacific before the con-
frontation with Indonesia in Malaysia was over, and was put under considerable
pressure from the US, Australia, and its other allies not to quit the region. This has
led some to argue that the decision to end the east-of-Suez role was “the result of a
lengthy, tortuous, and muddled reappraisal even if the principle had seemed sound
and realistic for several years.”22
Regardless, the official working papers for the defence review offer important
insights into how British policymakers in the 1960s conceptualised the Indo-Pacific
and British interests in the region. In a note drafted by a cross-departmental group
of officials in 1965, the starting point for “Western strategy in the Indo-Pacific” was
taken as “the West’s crucial interest in ensuring the containment of China and prevent-
ing eastern and southern Asia from falling under Chinese Communist domination.”
This would be best achieved, it was argued, “not by direct confrontation or bases in
the area but through the creation of a neutralised ‘belt’…free from the military pres-
ence of the Chinese on the one hand, and the Americans and ourselves on the other,
where local nationalism would be sufficiently strong and positive to constitute a
barrier to Chinese expansion.”23 This registered the appreciation of British

20. Harold Wilson, House of Commons debates, 16 January 1968, col. 1580.
21. See, in particular, Edward Longinotti, “Britain’s withdrawal from east of Suez: From economic deter-
minism to political choice,” Contemporary British History 29, no. 3 (2015): 318–340; and William
D. James, “Global Britain’s strategic problem east of Suez,” European Journal of International Security
6 (2021): 171–189.
22. Ronald Hyman, Britain’s Declining Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 388.
23. Defence review studies: Indo-Pacific strategy, note by the Secretaries, UK National Archives, CAB 148/
44/13, 20 October 1965.
352 International Journal 78(3)

policymakers for the balance of forces in the region and their spatial configuration,
whilst making abundantly clear the UK’s core strategic alliances: “We are heavily
dependent on the United States…[and]…bound by strong ties of kinship and sentiment
to Australia and New Zealand.” “Western strategy,” officials argued, “must be based
on the joint determination of the United States, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand to
organize resistance to the expansionist aims of China.” This four-power coordination
would not constitute an Indo-Pacific NATO, but it would have “NATO-type”
features.24
Here were the key elements of what would become a post-imperial British approach
to the Indo-Pacific: alignment with US strategy, despite Harold Wilson’s resistance to
committing British ground forces to the war in Vietnam; partnership with Australia and
New Zealand; and containment of China, buttressed by independent regional powers.
British power could no longer dominate, and its permanent military presence would be
henceforth withdrawn, but the region would still be constituted in the imagination of
British policymakers as one in which it had a key stakeholder role, alongside its
Anglo-world allies.

The return of “east-of-Suez” and the Indo-Pacific in

contemporary British politics
As Pardesi has argued, however, the systemic construction of the Indo-Pacific as a
region by the major powers dissipated in the remaining decades of the Cold War,
only to re-emerge in the twenty-first century. In British politics, the first references
to a return of “east of Suez” appear in UK government circles in the 2010s, following
the announcement in 2014 by the then foreign secretary, Rt. Hon. Philip Hammond, of
a new Royal Navy base in Bahrain—a relatively minor investment that was nonethe-
less heralded as “a return to a permanent British presence east of Suez” and celebrated
in the conservative press as a “military return to a region abandoned with the end of the
British empire.”25 The 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review committed the UK
to a new “Gulf Strategy” and “a permanent and more substantial UK military presence”
in the region, and in 2017, agreement was reached on a naval base and logistics hub in
Oman.26 The next year, following the Brexit referendum and his appointment as
foreign secretary, Boris Johnson referred with characteristic bombast to the Wilson

24. Ibid.
25. Philip Hammond, “Foreign Secretary speech on the challenges of extremism,” 31 October 2015, https://
www.gov.uk/government/speeches/foreign-secretary-speech-on-the-challenges-of-extremism (accessed
12 January 2023); Richard Spencer, “Britain returns ’east of Suez’ with permanent Royal Navy base in
Gulf,” Daily Telegraph, 6 December 2014, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/
11277194/Britain-returns-East-of-Suez-with-permanent-Royal-Navy-base-in-Gulf.html (accessed 12
January 2023).
26. “National security strategy and strategic defence and security review,” HM Government, London, 2015,
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/
478933/52309_Cm_9161_NSS_SD_Review_web_only.pdf (accessed 12 January 2023).
Pearce 353

government’s decision to withdraw from east of Suez as a “mistake”—a victory for the
“defeatists and retreatists” that he was now seeking to reverse. Johnson framed both the
UK’s east of Suez withdrawal and its entry to Europe as emblematic of national declin-
ism. Harnessing anti-declinist discourses has been an important political strategy for
British Eurosceptics and central to the justification of a post-Brexit “Global Britain.”
In the years preceding the Brexit referendum, British Eurosceptics had also reimag-
ined “Greater Britain,” “English-speaking peoples,” and the “special relationship”
between the UK and US as the “Anglosphere,” a global alliance of like-minded, free-
trading Anglo-liberal market democracies, with the Five Eyes countries of the US, UK,
Australia, Canada, and New Zealand at its core.27 The Anglosphere offered an alterna-
tive and politically potent way of imagining Britain’s role in the world as a global, neo-
liberal economy outside of the EU, reunited with old friends and natural allies. It also
helped justify a turn towards the Asia-Pacific, since this was not only a new source of
global economic growth, but home to Australia and New Zealand, and the dynamic
city-states of Singapore and Hong Kong. In the Eurosceptic worldview, the
Anglosphere was a transoceanic political and economic space, one that had both con-
temporary resonance and political appeal, and a deep history, replete with maritime
exploration and trade.
Alongside the centrality of the Anglosphere to the post-Brexit vision of “Global
Britain,” the emergence of the Indo-Pacific as a strategic concept for US policy in
the region, the reconstitution of the Quad dialogue between India, Japan, Australia,
and the US in 2018, and the intensification of economic and security confrontation
between the US and China prompted the extension and reformulation of the UK’s
new “east of Suez” posture beyond the Gulf towards Asia and the Pacific. The
Indo-Pacific would subsequently become an organizing concept for the UK too,
accompanied by a sharp tilt in the UK’s relationship with China away from the
“golden era” promised during Xi Jinping’s 2015 state visit to the UK and the commit-
ment to building a deeper partnership announced in the 2015 strategic review. This
shift in focus and strategy was supported by reports from the Whitehall and
Westminster penumbra of think tanks, notably the conservative Policy Exchange,
which set up an Indo-Pacific Commission chaired by former Canadian prime minister
Stephen Harper.28 Rising interest in the Indo-Pacific coincided with the formation of
the Conservative MPs’ Sino-sceptic China Research Group and other Conservative
backbench groupings seeking to steer the UK’s relationship with China towards align-
ment with the US posture. Yet although the momentum behind Indo-Pacific thinking
has come from the conservative movement and its think tanks, house magazines, and

27. Kenny and Pearce, Shadows of Empire, 132–166.

28. Policy Exchange, “A very British tilt: Towards a new UK strategy in the Indo-Pacific region,” 22
November 2020, https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/a-very-british-tilt/ (accessed 12 January
2023). See also Alession Patalano, “Days of future past: British strategy and the shaping of Indo-Pacific
security,” 2019, https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Days-of-Future-Past.pdf
(accessed 13 January 2023).
354 International Journal 78(3)

political groupings, there is nonetheless broad cross-party support for the strategy, and
particularly the shift towards a more confrontational stance with China. Political divi-
sions with the Labour Party largely focus on the implications of the Indo-Pacific “tilt”
for the UK’s defence commitments to NATO in the Euro-Atlantic and the priority of
guaranteeing allied security in Europe.
The 2021 Integrated Review formally announced this strategic reorientation and
Indo-Pacific “tilt.” The rationale for the tilt is that by 2030, the world will have
moved further towards multi-polarity and its geopolitical centre of gravity shifted east-
ward to the Indo-Pacific. The economic growth of the Indo-Pacific and its burgeoning
trade opportunities present opportunities; but the importance of maritime choke points
in key supply routes, and the consequences of climate change in the region, present
risks; while the rise of China and the “systemic competition” it poses is now considered
an “epoch-defining” challenge to UK interests and values. The Integrated Review
struck an uneasy balance between on the one hand, trade and diplomatic engagement
on climate change with China, and on the other, incremental decoupling and systemic
competition.
The review was also blunt in its aspiration that, post-Brexit, the UK seeks pre-
eminence amongst European nations in the Indo-Pacific. It claimed that among
European nations, the UK has “uniquely global interests, partnerships, and capabili-
ties” and will aim to establish “a greater and more persistent presence than any
other European country.” This was chiefly aimed at France and its Indo-Pacific strat-
egy, a diplomatic tension that burst into the open with the announcement of the
AUKUS defence and security pact. Boris Johnson, by then the UK prime minister,
claimed that AUKUS “makes visible and incarnates the Indo-Pacific tilt” in UK
strategy.29
In policy and operational terms, the Indo-Pacific plays out along several dimen-
sions. In defence, the UK has committed to longer and more consistent military
deployments in the region, which began with the inaugural deployment of the
Carrier Strike Group in 2021, and will continue with increased maritime presence
through offshore patrol vessels, the Littoral Response Group, and Type 31 frigates.
The integrated review reaffirmed the commitment to the Five Eyes (“Our partnerships
with Canada, Australia, and New Zealand will be at the heart of our tilt to the
Indo-Pacific as we work to support them to tackle the security challenges in the
region”) and to the Five Power Defence Agreements. On trade, the UK has conducted
accession negotiations for the Common and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific
Partnership (CPTPP), and has signed free trade agreements with Australia and New
Zealand, as well as rollover deals from leaving the EU with Japan and the Republic
of Korea. In addition to the AUKUS San Diego agreement on SSN nuclear-powered
submarines, the UK is pursuing defence agreements and industry partnerships with
Japan and the Republic of Korea, including the trilateral UK-Italy-Japan Global

29. Boris Johnson, House of Commons debates, 16/09/2021, col. 1119.

Pearce 355

Combat Air Programme.30 Throughout the Integrated Review and associated strategy
documents, there is an emphasis on engagement with a range of allies in the
Indo-Pacific. For fiscal, military, and diplomatic reasons, the UK is seeking to
deepen its Indo-Pacific alliances.

Lessons of history
What lessons can we draw from this historical survey of British political thinking on
the Indo-Pacific? First, although there is occasionally deliberate historical bombast and
neo-colonialism in recent discussion about “east of Suez,” the “Indo-Pacific,” and
“Global Britain,” the history of British political thought and practice in Asia and the
Pacific is marked by a consistent awareness of the reality of multipolarity, of contested
and shared spaces, whether that is with other imperial powers, new and old, or with
China, Japan, and other Asian and Pacific peoples and regimes. There is perhaps an
historical memory amongst British policymakers of the contingency and frailty of
British imperial power in Asia and the Pacific—even at its height—of “weak
empires,” as J.C. Sharman has put it, or insecure “bridgeheads” during periods of ter-
ritorial expansion, and the ignominy of defeat and drawdown.31
The insistence by contemporary theorists that the Indo-Pacific is not simply a con-
struct for bi-polar rivalry between the US and China, but a multi-polar region with an
important role for “middle players” also reflects this history.32 In the 1960s defence
review, Britain construed the containment of China as a major objective of
Indo-Pacific strategy, and elements of that perspective have returned to the fore in
recent years, in tandem with rising tensions in the South China Sea and the looming
threat of conflict over Taiwan. The Indo-Pacific shift in US geopolitical strategy has
presaged a turn away from British cooperation and deepening economic ties with
China towards systemic competition. But today, the UK’s relatively diminished
power prompts it to seek a broader range of allies and defence partners in the
region, while geopolitical realities have been reshaped by decades of economic
growth across south and east Asia that have not only underpinned the rise of China,
but also of India, the ASEAN states, Taiwan, Japan, and the Republic of Korea.
Awareness of these multiple interests, the realities of the balance of forces, and the
implicit appreciation of the limits of British political and military capabilities arguably

30. “Joint leaders statement on AUKUS,” White House, Washington, DC, 13 March 2023, https://www.
whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/03/13/joint-leaders-statement-on-aukus-2/;
(accessed 22 May 2023); “PM announces new international coalition to develop the next generation of
combat aircraft,” UK Government, London, 9 December 2022, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/
pm-announces-new-international-coalition-to-develop-the-next-generation-of-combat-aircraft (accessed
22 May 2023).
31. J.C. Sharman, Empires of the Weak (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019); John Darwin,
“Imperialism and the Victorians: The dynamics of territorial expansion,” The English Historical Review
112, no. 446 (2019): 614–642.
32. Medcalf, Indo-Pacific Empire, 13.
356 International Journal 78(3)

inform the UK’s attempts to construct new defence partnerships in the region, while
necessitating interoperability and joint deployment of naval forces. The Integrated
Review Refresh 2023 states that “a free and open Indo-Pacific is one where a regional
balance of power ensures no single power dominates, and where a rich tapestry of insti-
tutions and partnerships shape a stable but adaptable regional order.” It notes that as
“the UK has less overall resource and geographic presence than in the
Euro-Atlantic, [it] will prioritize working through partners and institutions, and build-
ing deep relationships anchored in decades-long economic, technological, and security
ties.”33
Despite, then, its rhetorical pretentions to global leadership, and the claims of unique
reach and range that are liberally sprinkled across UK policy papers, there are more mea-
sured, realistic strands of thinking in British policy-making which can be traced back
through the 1960s defence review and beyond. These do not negate the very real chal-
lenges posed by the Indo-Pacific deployments—of spreading assets too thinly and
relying on allies to deploy them, while exposing Britain to entanglement in conflict
over Taiwan and its forces to hostile action—but they counsel caution that the
Indo-Pacific tilt can be interpreted simply in the familiar terms of post-imperial overreach.
Second, there is a clear hierarchy of commitment in the Integrated Review and other
British discussions of the Indo-Pacific that reflects older racial and political hierarchies.
At the top are the US and the Anglosphere, the Five Eyes within which AUKUS is
“nested,” despite Canada and New Zealand’s absence. There then follow regional
allies and “middle powers,” with priority given to former colonies, and Japan and
the Republic of Korea. India is framed through the seemingly eternal post-colonial
search for “transformation” in cooperation. These policy hierarchies mirror those of
early Victorian racial hierarchies, of “Greater Britain” versus the rest of the Empire,
or the “New and Old Commonwealth” in the twentieth century. Such ways of thinking
about Britain, and her relationship to powers in the Indo-Pacific, have long historical
lineages, but cannot be reduced to mere imperial nostalgia. Instead, they have been uti-
lised within an array of political discourses and projects, from advocacy of the Imperial
Federation in the late Victorian era and tariff reform in the early 1900s, through to
Churchill’s “three circles” attempt to shore up Britain’s power after World War
Two, and the more recent Eurosceptic invocation of the Anglosphere. The framing
of the Indo-Pacific and the AUKUS pact in contemporary British politics carries
unmistakeable traces of these lineages.
Third, the Integrated Review and other documents focused on the Indo-Pacific are
replete with historical motifs and tropes of Britain as a “maritime trading nation” and a
“global champion of free and fair trade,” prioritising “freedom of navigation” and unhin-
dered commerce. The Indo-Pacific and the Brexit turn away from the EU have facilitated a

33. “Integrated review refresh 2023: Responding to a more contested and volatile world,” HM Government,
CP811, London, March 2023, 23–24, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/
system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1145586/11857435_NS_IR_Refresh_2023_Supply_AllPages_
Revision_7_WEB_PDF.pdf (accessed 22 May 2023).
Pearce 357

return to “blue water,” naval and global imaginaries of British identity and interest, and
away from continental, European postures and gravity models of trade.34 This is reflected
in the central role of the Royal Navy in the UK’s Indo-Pacific strategy.
The issue for the UK—as for other European powers–is whether Russia’s invasion
of Ukraine upends these imaginaries and forces a rethink of the Indo-Pacific strategy,
and even a complete policy return to the Euro-Atlantic, as some on the British Left are
arguing should be the basis of the foreign policy of an incoming Labour government.35
The Indo-Pacific tilt implies a relatively benign environment for defence spending,
which is belied by Britain’s precarious fiscal position, and just as in the 1960s, com-
mitments “east of Suez” now also compete with the costs of arming Ukraine and UK
obligations to NATO on the European landmass. Nor do British economic interests
necessitate maritime naval commitments in the Indo-Pacific; geography trumps
history when it comes to trade, and Europe remains a far more important market for
the UK’s largely service economy than east Asia.
The Integrated Review Refresh 2023 registers the transformation in the UK’s posi-
tion wrought by Russia’s war in Ukraine, stating that the security of the Euro-Atlantic
is a “core priority” and the “primary theatre” to which the UK will commit the majority
of its defence capabilities. Meanwhile, the rhetoric of “Global Britain” has been quietly
dropped.36 If not Makinder’s revenge, it represents a tilt for Britain back towards
Europe and the land domain of warfare.
Yet even if this course correction is eventually pursued, it remains noteworthy that
the Indo-Pacific has been continually interpreted and constructed by British political
elites as a region in which the UK has key interests and a core stakeholder role. It dem-
onstrates that the meanings of the Indo-Pacific are more malleable, and the political
projects in which it has been deployed more varied, than recent commentary suggests.
It is also perhaps an illustration of the importance of political imaginaries to the
framing of state strategies and the limitations of purely realist interpretations of
Britain’s framing of its role in the world.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

34. Glen O’Hara, Britain and the Sea Since 1600 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010); Nick Whittaker, “The island
race: Ontological security and critical geopolitics in British parliamentary discourse,” Geopolitics 23, no.
4 (2018): 954–985.
35. Paul Mason, “Sunak: More Indo-Pacific hubris,” Medium, 29 November 2022, https://paulmasonnews.
medium.com/sunak-more-indo-pacific-hubris-a14bd9502a7c (accessed 13 January 2022).
36. Richard G.Whitman, “Are we seeing the slow death of Global Britain?,” UK in a Changing Europe, 16
December 2022, https://ukandeu.ac.uk/are-we-seeing-the-slow-death-of-global-britain/ (accessed 22
May 2023).
358 International Journal 78(3)

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Author Biography
Nick Pearce is Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Institute for Policy
Research at the University of Bath, UK. He is co-author with Michael Kenny of
Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics (Cambridge: Polity, 2018).