Harrison Layden-Fritz: Welcome to the age of strategic autonomy

Harrison Layden-Fritz is a Conservative campaigner and political writer. A centre-right free marketeer, he is passionate about restoring opportunity for the next generation and the renewal of Conservatism.

On the 28th of February, forty-seven years after the Iranian Revolution named America as its ultimate enemy, the tension finally ignited. British political conversation should have turned immediately to our energy exposure, fractured supply chains and the fragility of a regional order on which our trade, aviation and financial networks depend. Instead, a chorus rose from the Left about tax exiles in Dubai.

Set aside that those caught in the region were tourists, not expats. For those who have built their lives in the Gulf, there has been no rush for the exit doors. The reasons people build lives abroad do not dissolve with a short-term conflict. What matters most is that the Left’s mobilisation of anti-expat rhetoric was not just a distraction. It was a symptom. A political class still navigating by the stars of a vanished world, reaching instinctively for the wrong argument because it has never developed the right ones.

That is the defining problem of British politics today. Not any single crisis, but the absence of a doctrine equal to the age we are entering.

The world that no longer exists

The post-Cold War settlement rested on assumptions that have now collapsed. That interdependence was inherently stabilising. That open markets were self-correcting. That multilateral institutions would contain conflict. That Britain could safely thread its prosperity through global systems without maintaining the sovereign capacity to act independently of them.

For a generation those assumptions felt like realism. With the benefit of hindsight, they were a prolonged act of strategic optimism, sustained long past the point the evidence supported them.

The 2008 financial crisis showed that global capital markets transmit catastrophic risk faster than any institution can contain it. Covid proved that supply chains built for efficiency rather than resilience fail precisely when most needed. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine confirmed that territorial aggression in Europe was not a historical relic. And now the Gulf, long treated as a stable hub for trade, travel and finance, cannot invest its way out of the dynamics of its neighbourhood.

These are not separate shocks. They are expressions of a single reality. The liberal international order is not fraying at the edges. It is being actively dismantled at its centre. What is emerging in its place is a multipolar world defined not by shared rules but by competing power, in which interdependence is weaponised as readily as it is celebrated. The nations that prosper will be those that recover genuine agency over their own affairs. Britain has not yet reckoned with what that demands.

The response from European capitals has been no more reassuring. Where clarity and resolve were demanded, the continent offered process, statement and hesitation. This is not a failure of individual leadership. It is the terminal expression of a worldview: that institutions, dialogue and interdependence are sufficient answers to the exercise of raw power. They are not. The neoliberal order has no doctrine for the world now emerging. It has only the memory of the one that has gone before.

The cost of outsourced sovereignty

Strategic complacency has a price, and we are beginning to pay it.

Our energy policy was built on the assumption of stable global supply. Our defence industrial base was hollowed out on the assumption that large-scale conflict was obsolete. Our financial architecture was integrated into global markets on the assumption they would remain open and predictable. Our foreign policy was conducted through multilateral institutions on the assumption those institutions retained coherence and authority.

Every one of those assumptions is now in question. Energy prices lurch widely with every global shock. Supply chains fracture under geopolitical pressure. Our defence posture has struggled to respond at pace to a transformed threat environment. Our diplomatic leverage is constrained by dependencies we were warned about and chose to ignore.

This is not a counsel of despair. It is an honest account of where we stand. And honesty is the beginning of strategy.

Strategic autonomy

Britain is a resource-light island nation. Global trade accounts for more than sixty percent of our GDP. We cannot turn inward and we should not try. The question has never been whether to engage with the world. It is on what terms.

For thirty years we have participated in the global system as though participation itself were a form of power. It is not. In a multipolar world, genuine power rests on the capacity to act independently when necessary and to choose your dependencies rather than inherit them by default. That is what I mean by strategic autonomy. It is the organising principle Britain’s foreign and economic policy has lacked for a generation. Not isolation. Not nostalgia. The disciplined, clear-eyed reconstruction of Britain’s capacity to determine its own course.

That means energy we control, not energy we import at the mercy of hostile states. It means a defence posture built around sovereign industrial capacity and genuine deterrence, not the performance of it. It means domestic capital markets capable of backing British growth rather than a financial architecture totally dependent on footloose foreign flows. It means alliances chosen and maintained on the basis of shared strategic reality, not institutional habit. And it means treating Brexit for what it should always have been: not a cultural statement but a strategic unbinding, the removal of external constraint so that Britain can once again choose, adapt and act in its own interests. That window is already being closed.

None of this is cost-free, and intellectual honesty demands we say so. Strategic autonomy requires hard arguments that British politics has ducked for too long. We cannot build a resilient economy while the number of people out of work due to long-term sickness has risen by approximately forty percent since 2019. We cannot embrace the advantages of AI and automation while carrying some of the highest industrial electricity prices among developed nations. We cannot unleash the entrepreneurial talent of future generations while piling an ever-higher burden of an ageing population onto their shoulders. These are not peripheral concerns. They are the foundations the doctrine must be built on.

Nor can we claim genuine strategic autonomy while remaining judicially subordinate to bodies whose authority we have never meaningfully chosen. Britain was a pioneer of human rights and the rule of law long before the ICC, ICJ or ECHR existed. The United States enshrined such principles in the UN Charter but never felt the need to subject itself to foreign judicial oversight. It trusted its own processes. To those who decry any attempt to reassert British self-determination, the question is simple: do you not trust us? Strategic autonomy means retaining the sovereign right to act in our national interest, on defence, borders and security, without being vetoed by institutions of contested legitimacy. If we are to lead within NATO as American engagement recedes, we need armed forces and a defence industrial base capable of delivering on our commitments, and the legal clarity to act without paralysis, as Starmer’s failure on Iran made plain.

In the end, strategic autonomy is not the easy path. But it is the right one.

Taken together, these are not a list of policies. They are the load-bearing walls of a new British settlement, one built for a world of permanent competition rather than assumed stability.

The Conservative case

There is nothing inevitable about which party writes this doctrine, especially given the hard choices involved. But there is a natural home for it.

Strategic autonomy is a Conservative idea at its core. The same instinct that drives Conservative thinking on personal responsibility and self-determination applies equally to nations. Dependence, whether of individuals on the state or of Britain on systems we do not control, is a vulnerability to be reduced, not a comfort to be managed. Ownership of your own condition, with all the accountability that entails, is the foundation of genuine strength.

The Conservative Party’s greatest governing achievements were built on exactly this clarity. The willingness to see the world as it is, name what that demands, and act before events make the choice for you. That clarity has been absent. For fourteen years the party administered an inherited settlement, trusting that Britain’s natural entrepreneurialism would endure in spite of an unreformed state, and that the world would not punish a lack of strategic foresight. It placed its faith in stability continuing. Stability did not continue.

The pressure points, the Gulf, Eastern Europe, the Indo-Pacific, the contest over technology and critical supply chains, will not resolve themselves. They will intensify. The political force that develops a coherent doctrine before it is forced to by events will own the serious ground of British politics for a generation.

That is the opportunity now. Not to manage the consequences of a changed world, but to think clearly about what governing in it requires. To develop the doctrine before the crisis demands it. To lead the argument rather than react to its conclusions.

The age of strategic reliance is over.

The question is whether British Conservatism has the clarity to say so, and the courage to resolve it.