UK's delusions of grandeur creating sea of trouble: China Daily editorial

The United Kingdom is to become the 12th member of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. It will be the first new member since the major Asia-Pacific trade partnership was created in 2018, and the first European country to join the pact.

While the UK government has hailed it as evidence that the country is "seizing the opportunities of our new post-Brexit trade freedoms" — which it certainly needs to do having got itself in a pretty rotten pickle with that rash move — the impact of CPTPP membership on the UK economy is expected to be fairly small.

In Tokyo, Japanese government spokesman Hirokazu Matsuno offered a better insight into the UK's motivations, saying the UK's accession "will have great meaning for forming a free and fair economic order".

Such rhetoric is the hallmark of the US-led clique when talking about China, and the UK's move provides further evidence that it is tagging along for a ride on Washington's "Indo-Pacific" strategy.

The UK has already struck a controversial security agreement with the United States and Australia that signals it intends to increase its military footprint in the Asia-Pacific, and it has followed the US lead in conducting so-called freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea. Although some have suggested that is primarily to justify the cash it has splashed on two new aircraft carriers as props for its declining status.

There is certainly no need for the UK to take up arms with the US to create a sea of troubles.

While there are territorial disputes between China and some Southeast Asian countries, these are their own disputes and have nothing to do with a European nation thousands of kilometers away. As a spokesperson for China's UK embassy said: "The UK is not a country in the region, nor a party to the South China Sea issue."

The UK's aggressive posturing in the region as a tag-along dogsbody of the US is not conducive to resolving the disputes peacefully, as China and its neighbors are resolved to do, for the benefit of themselves and the region as a whole.

The UK government needs greater self-awareness. It is not China that is being "aggressive and coercive", as an official from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office recently claimed in an interview. Those remarks distort the facts.

And as if that was not enough to ruin its relationship with China, the foreign and security policy outlined in its refreshed Integrated Review 2023, openly calls China an "epoch-defining threat", despite China not being the one sailing its warships half way round the world to try and bully another country.

The UK should recognize that its delusions of grandeur are letting Washington again lead it astray.