| Popis: |
Whereas the United Kingdom had possessed the largest European colonial empire in Asia, spanning from India to South East Asia and from China to the South Pacific, decolonization fundamentally curtailed its presence in the region. London’s regional footprint became smaller than that of post-colonial France but larger than that of Germany. This, in turn, shaped the relative breadth of its strategic and economic interests and the course of its foreign and security policy in the region. This chapter shows that Beijing’s growing assertiveness in the 2010s—and British policymakers’ perceptions of it—led the United Kingdom to strategically re-engage the East of Suez. In particular, growing regional economic interests and, crucially, rising threat perceptions of China caused the hardening of the United Kingdom’s policy goals and, in turn, a strengthening of the policy instruments leveraged to achieve such goals in the region. To substantiate this argument, the first two sections analyse the evolution of London’s economic interests in the region and of British policymakers’ threat assessment of China as central drivers of the United Kingdom’s foreign and security policy in the Asia-Pacific. The subsequent two sections show how rising economic interests and, decisively, a heightened threat assessment of China caused London to revise its policy goals and the resulting policy instruments, driving it to bolster its political-military engagement in the Asia-Pacific in the 2010s. It also considers the impact of Brexit on UK-European diplomatic and security cooperation in the Asia-Pacific. |
