On 19 March 2008 Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, announced the publication by the Cabinet Office of the first National Security Strategy of the United Kingdom (NSS).⁽¹⁾ This new White Paper sets out (or rather recalls) the nature of the United Kingdom’s new security priorities and the way to meet them; it extends the 1998 Strategic Defence Review, which has become less relevant over the past few years and has come in for some severe criticism.

In his speech on the NSS, the Prime Minister reminded Parliament that while the duty of the British government remained the protection of its citizens and its national interests, the end of the Cold War had profoundly modified the international environment. Today’s threats are intangible, and can no longer be resolved uniquely by the use of armed force. The new era of asymmetric war is forcing states to modify their defence strategy and take a fresh look at their security policies.

The National Security Strategy

The principal thrust of the NSS is to underline the interdependence of the different factors of insecurity, advance the idea of ‘global security’,⁽²⁾ and allocate a much more important role to the Army’s ‘intelligence services, its special forces and its engineers at the expense of high-end capabilities like armour and artillery’.⁽³⁾ The budget allocated to the fight against terrorism is to be increased from its 2007 level of £2.5 billion to £3.5 billion by 2010. On the diplomatic level, Britain’s preference is for a policy of ‘early engagement’, acting to attack the core problems of poverty, migratory fluxes, and the economic and political instability of States in crisis.