With an ongoing war in Ukraine, the Middle East boiling over once again, and a resurgent China increasingly pushing the boundaries of the Rules-Based International System, it has become frighteningly clear that the Royal Navy, and by extension the United Kingdom, is wandering the strategic wasteland without direction. Many have long bemoaned a lack of ‘grand strategy’ within UK domestic and foreign policy, and many lay the blame in different areas: Britain’s managed post-imperial decline, political short-termism, the rise of populism, Brexit, a long-held naïve belief in the West that the rules…
