Quite apart from the rancid scandals and endless mendacities that spurred the ouster of Boris Johnson from power, there is the deeper legacy of his tenure as Britain’s prime minister: He severely weakened his country’s place in the world.
It might not seem so, given his assertive stance in defending Ukraine from the Russian invasion, sending more than $1 billion in military assistance (second only to the United States) and traveling twice to Kyiv for morale-boosting meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
But Britain’s role in defending Ukraine, and in confronting Russia more broadly, could have been had a much more potent effect.
His original sin was Brexit, which he avidly pushed as a sensation-seeking journalist and Tory member of parliament, then had to convert to actual policy—something way beyond his ken—as his government’s unlikely leader.
If not for Brexit, Britain could have stood up as Europe’s leader when Russian aggression roused the continent’s leaders into unified action that hadn’t been seen in decades, if ever. But having exited from the European Union and playing no role in EU policymaking, Johnson could run only a sideshow—fairly effective as far as it went, but a sideshow nonetheless.
For a while, before Ukraine emerged as the globe’s big crisis, he played the game of international politics quite shrewdly, touting the divorce from Europe as an opportunity to throw off the confining rules and regulations from Brussels and to revive Great Britain’s status as a great power. In campaigning for Brexit, he exaggerated both the oppressions of Brussels (in fact, EU membership was a net positive for Britain’s economy) and London’s capacity for world leadership.
Johnson knew that he was exaggerating, and so, after cutting his ties to the continent, he did the one thing that might pull Britain closer to to the center of global influence, if only by association: He sucked up to the American superpower, drawing a contrast to the EU, whose leaders were dawdling on the world stage.
While French President Emmanuel Macron spun a vision of “strategic autonomy” for Europe, Johnson played up Britain’s role in NATO, the American-led military alliance. While German Chancellor Angela Merkel basked in her country’s historical pacifism, Johnson boosted Britain’s defense budget. While Macron, Merkel, and most of the other Euro leaders sighed in dismay at President Donald Trump’s primitivism and his open derision of entangling alliances, especially those with Europe, Johnson embraced him as a brother.
In March 2021, Johnson’s government released a 110-page document titled Global Britain in a Competitive Age, which attempted to outline how the U.K.’s power would be unleashed, now that it untethered from the Continent. It touted, with particular pride, the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, “one of the two largest warships ever built for the Royal Navy,” which would tour all the seas of the world and “project cutting-edge military power in support of NATO and international maritime security.” The paper’s longest chapter included a section on “Shaping the Open International Order of the Future,” and included several pages on the central peacekeeping importance of Britain’s nuclear deterrent and Johnson’s determination to modernize its arsenal.
From the document’s tone of triumph and vision of the U.K. at the center of world affairs, you’d never know that the sun had set on the British empire more than a half century before.
Even in its heyday of post-World War II power (which was a drastic comedown from its pre-war standing), Britain was very clearly a junior partner to the new Western superpower across the sea. As long ago as the Iraq war, Prime Minister Tony Blair was lampooned as a lapdog to President George W. Bush. Today, Britain ranks as one of several associate board members in America’s non-EU allies, alongside Japan, India, Australia, South Korea, Israel, and perhaps a few others—and not the most important among those. The notion that Britain, alone outside greater Europe, could possibly lead the way in “shaping the open international order of the future,” as Johnson’s document claimed, is a sad joke.
Still, in his first year-and-a-half as prime minister, Johnson seemed to be on to something. The American president was Donald Trump, who fully reciprocated Johnson’s warm embrace. Both men were outsized outsiders, brazenly underqualified showmen who’d invented their own brand of populist nationalism, who saw in each other a reflection of themselves. (It was widely observed that they even looked somewhat alike.)
When Joe Biden became president, the trans-Atlantic ardor cooled. Biden opposed Brexit, has long viewed the world through the framework of alliances (especially the alliance with Europe), and was understandably uncharmed by Johnson’s Trumpian style.
Still, relations warmed when Johnson stepped up as Biden’s most enthusiastic partner in helping Ukraine stave off Russia’s invasion. He may have been driven by the same goals as his foreign policy generally: to thicken London’s ties with Washington and to fashion an image of Britain as a re-emergent world power—in part to show that he was right to push for Brexit, to show that a Britain detached from Europe could still be powerful, even more powerful than before.
But to the surprise of many, the EU nations stepped up as well, proving that they could play international politics—even set cohesive policy in a war—without Britain. Had Brexit failed, London (presumably led by someone other than Johnson) would have been a geostrategic leader in EU’s new global posture. With London’s leadership, Europe might have emerged in this crisis as a stronger force—not quite an equal to Washington, but something close.
Instead, the war in Ukraine has shown once again that, for better or worse, the United States is the West’s indispensable power—that Europe (much less Britain by itself) is incapable of mounting an organized, effective diplomatic or military campaign without America’s leadership. Macron’s efforts to open a separate dialogue with Russian President Vladimir Putin have been risibly futile, mainly because France has no leverage over Russia. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has confronted Russia in ways that Merkel and her predecessors never did, but his dependence on Russian energy supplies has limited the initiative he can take. Putin’s aggression has spurred the leaders of Finland and Sweden to drop their longstanding military neutrality, but their route to full membership in the West was to join the U.S.-led NATO, not some less-than-nascent European defense force.
In that sense, Johnson’s hard alignment with Washington was a good move. It was the best move he could make under the constrained circumstances of a Britain cut off from Europe. But Johnson played a major role in creating those circumstances. Without Johnson, there probably never would have been a Brexit.
The next prime minister may try to mend ties with the European Union—not to repeal Brexit (that battle probably can’t be re-fought) but at least to treat Brussels as an ally, not an antagonist. Still, his successor will be locked in to Johnson’s geopolitical prison, and, when it comes to foreign policy, for better and for worse, he or she will probably follow the course that Johnson set.
