What should the future of British foreign policy look like? For too long successive governments have shied away from acknowledging uncomfortable truths about the decline of Britain’s military capabilities.
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Lord McDonald was the British ambassador to Germany and later permanent under-secretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and head of the Diplomatic Service.
He argues that the UK’s significant soft-power strengths can be harnessed to expand our international influence. Such a shift will only be possible, he says, if we first acknowledge the challenges of Brexit and the need to reduce our unrealistic hard-power ambitions. Excellence in areas that other countries care about will keep the UK internationally relevant in a way that nostalgia for a lost pre-eminence will not.