As US-China tensions mount, the UK will need to work closer with Europe in the Indo-Pacific

US-China rivalry – already a growing concern of global leaders, policymakers, pundits and business elites – is set to heat up further as we head into a US election year.

The UK’s strategy for the Indo-Pacific region is built around its alliance with the US. This was formalised in September 2021 with the announcement of Aukus, a military alliance with the US and Australia. Yet its major interests there – in security, economy, diplomacy and human rights – appear more closely aligned with Brussels than Washington.

The imperative to coordinate, if not align, with Europe will become stronger still if Donald Trump returns to the US presidency in 2024. The Trump campaign’s blustery, social media-driven China policy and scepticism of the US’s alliances is the worst of all worlds for allies such as the UK, raising the risks of both abandonment and entrapment.

Facing the increased uncertainty from Washington, the UK and Europe may have to band together to protect their interests in the world’s most economically vibrant region.

After leaving the EU, the former UK prime minister Boris Johnson announced an “Indo-Pacific tilt” that has expanded the UK’s engagement in the region – for example, through the dispatch of a UK carrier strike group to Japan in 2021.

Ironically, Britain’s pivot away from the European bloc and towards the Indo-Pacific calls for greater policy coordination with Europe.

One area where such coordination is necessary is maritime security in the contested waters of the South China Sea. European states are natural naval partners for the UK in asserting the rules of UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos) – which the US has not ratified – against People’s Republic of China encroachments such as artificial island-building and environmental destruction.

Recent passages by French, German and Dutch ships through the South China Sea have generally not triggered public shows of anger from the PRC party-state. For Britain, this suggests that partnering with smaller European navies to balance China’s increasing naval power would carry less risk of reprisal or escalation from Beijing than sailing with the US Navy.

The UK could use the opportunity to encourage European navies to do more in the field of maritime security. This could start with increased ship dispatches, port visits, cooperative exchanges with regional navies and “freedom of navigation” operations. When carried out by countries other than the US, such patrols underscore that the provisions of Unclos are principled rules, rather than political tools.

Global trade

On global trade in general, the UK and US are moving in opposite directions. There remains little sign of the promised US-UK free trade agreement. In its absence, Britain is placing trade at the centre of its Indo-Pacific tilt, joining the region’s most ambitious free trade deal, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement on Trans-Pacific Partnership.

There are real risks to opening up greater trade in the Indo-Pacific. Whitehall is rightly concerned about the security of internationalised supply chains. Meanwhile, western nations are “friend-shoring” production – moving supply chain networks to allies and friends. Sheer geographical proximity means Europe will likely be central in any plan to ensure resiliency in UK supply chains, while expanding trade links in the Indo-Pacific.

Then there is economic coercion, which Xi Jinping’s PRC has increasingly deployed against a wide range of targets from Japan to Lithuania over political disputes. Here, again, there’s more the UK can do with Europe.

The EU last year legislated an anti-coercion instrument designed to enable rapid and coordinated pushback and assistance when member states are targeted by economic coercion. The UK should seek to join up or at least align with the EU’s approach to economic coercion.

In light of the UK’s considerable economic size, it would be in the EU’s own interest to work with Britain in building out and implementing this scheme.

Diplomatic moves

Last year’s Integrated Review Refresh, the latest update to the UK’s foreign policy priorities, described climate change and biodiversity loss as existential threats. And it committed the UK to pushing back against human rights violations in China by aligning with the UK’s allies and partners.

A second Trump administration is unlikely to be a reliable partner on these issues, nor on the threat of China using force against self-governing, democratic Taiwan. Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Accords in 2017 and praised Xi’s policy of mass internment of ethnic Uyghurs. He also recently refused to say if he would help Taiwan if the PRC attacked, responding instead with broadsides against Taiwan’s chip industry for “taking our business”.

When part of the EU, British diplomats were well known as effective contributors to the EU’s diplomatic service. The UK will need to draw on this experience if it wishes to see progress on the threat of climate change and human rights abuses in Xinjiang and elsewhere.

A win for Europe

The UK has been struggling to advance a coherent definition of its relations with China, and a strategy articulating what it wants from the relationship. The European Council’s description of the EU-China relationship -– partner on global challenges, competitor on technology, rival on governance –- has provided a stable framework since 2019.

There is also a win for Europe in all this. For its part, the EU wants Beijing to acknowledge it as a “geopolitical power” – a third pole in global affairs distinct from the US.

Expanding maritime security, supply chain resiliency, countercoercion, human rights and other diplomatic engagement with the UK – and indeed facilitating its ambitions in the Indo-Pacific – would offer a way for Brussels to show it is a serious player in the region.

Andrew Chubb consults for the Great Britain-China Centre and the Ministry of Defence.

m.wyss@lancaster.ac.uk receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and consults for the Ministry of Defence.