Kerosene is part of an indispensable group of molecules imported to fuel British air travel. Given that much of the world’s economy depends on it, it would be no surprise to find that open conflict in the Gulf—the world’s largest concentration of transiting hydrocarbons—has challenged supply to Trumpian levels of deprivation. The United Kingdom’s Department for Business and Trade has issued a trade licence simultaneously banning and providing exemption for the import of Russian oil products via proxy countries such as India. Apparently arbitrary (it’s not), this decision refers to the most serious tension in modern British foreign policy: Britain’s conviction increasingly exceeds its capacity to act upon it.
This country has always had in modern history the wherewithal to fight ‘the good fight’, we can call it. Noble and proud, yet humble and diplomatic; whether through necessity and strategy or selflessness and humanity. The initiative by which the UK has engaged Russia through Ukraine is, respectively, strikingly proactive. The truth is that the sanctions regime imposed on Russia was never going to be airtight: this world’s economic interdependence is probably the most defining feature of our globalisation. As far as Russia desires Western goods and services, the UK is that much more—fundamentally—reliant on the resources coming the other way. It’s a way of life: we have climbed the global value chain—beyond resource extraction, beyond manufacturing—to the top of the ladder where we now ride a classically British dependence on foreign trade (the people holding the ladder). What kind of relevance is this—what nation in this world as we find it is truly self-sufficient?
Such problems in modern strategy arise when the value chain itself becomes weaponised. China was our canary in the coal mine. It hasn’t caused too many problems. Russia, on the other hand, specialised with the appropriately mundane ambition of becoming Europe’s gas station (American terminology usefully alluding to both oil and natural gas in one fell analogy). It was suitably uncomfortable even to attempt to burn that gas station to the ground—the economists like to rant and rave of diversification, replication, reshoring, and regionalisation but, alas, there are just some conditions to our prosperous prosperity that won’t ever be magicked into neat little autarkic boundaries. The water is cold, but real. Notwithstanding the widest-spread principle that each nation should always strive to develop its own comparative advantage, structurally asymmetric dependencies leave leverage.
And Russian oil products, it seems, find their own market. It was India that developed huge margins in the wake of Western sanctions by importing and refining homeless Russian oil—only to sell on to exactly who you might expect. Yes, it’s laughable. The United Kingdom sanctioned Russian oil so that they could buy it through India instead. Some solace that we are not alone in doing so? The simple point at hand is that the UK cannot meaningfully realise its conviction while its capacity to do so is compromised by the object of that conviction.
Nobody is afraid to name this: the UK has no right to tell India they cannot import Russian oil; the UK has no basis to sanction India. Do they? Well, if you issue a trade licence of no practical effect, apparently you can. There being no practical effect because while the exemption applies to only diesel and kerosene, these are precisely the fuels actually imported through third countries. The optics of such a decision became nonetheless quite favourable when in May kerosene imports dried up faster than a communal punch bowl, threatening not just price hikes but real shortages. A Russian-derived stopgap—I can tell you, my friends—was on my bingo card. Put simply, Russian oil is finding its way into the UK in ever greater volumes. The de facto trading situation was, then, becoming embarrassingly detached from the de jure, and this trend of trading with the enemy can be expected to continue as energy insecurity inevitably strikes again. Worse than that, let me say: Britain officially reneged on its sanctions against a criminal state because it could not afford them. Where else does the dreaded concession rear its ugly head?
British capabilities and capacities are fundamentally instrumental to ensuring that our ethical and moral prerogatives have bite. It plays into the larger themes of dependency and resilience in 20s geopolitics, what we are thrust into with unprecedented urgency. There are opportunities this government recognises among potential supply chain coordination with allies or like-minded partners, which are set to grow in relevance as global concentrations of rare earth metals and advanced manufacturing and fabrication bring more acute exposure. If we are to realise genuinely meaningful humanitarian policy at the same time we navigate these viral technological specialisations, we will have to develop our strategic autonomy with shrewd—sometimes outrageous—manoeuvre and compromise. It conjures the national memory of the Destroyers-for Bases Agreement signed in 1940, whereby the UK traded to the US widespread basing rights across the Western hemisphere in exchange for a huge and vital naval force—arguably ceding its great-power status for the first time. That kind of leverage might not exist today, but what we have in bounds is the agency to explore; the freedom to choose who we trust and who we rely upon; which asymmetries we are willing to wear. The EU is a bed of its own. The Indo-Pacific promises growth, as does the Commonwealth. Somewhere between all of them is a path, not to security, but to resilience.
The next challenge will be to maintain that conviction while the world’s tumult forces pragmatism or populist and impossible politics altogether. We should leverage every nation in our ‘good fight’, unbounded by discrimination or controversy, while setting positive outlooks within each. Some of the more belligerent nations may influence our direction and lure us into cruel relationships; its uncertainty should not deter us from what we know to be our end. Israel, Turkiye, China; what countries are difficult but relatable and productive can help us. Values-based realism is one of the new doctrines of the West. It adheres to humanity’s prosperity and freedom, but sometimes only indirectly—and that is a reality to get to grips with. Whether it’s Diego Garcia, or Russian oil—we have concessions to make. Not least, it’s fairly humorous that the rules-based international order will require us to break a few rules.