In coming days I will delve into more detail on aspects of the IR. Today, setting priorities. The US historian John Lewis Gaddis defined strategy as ‘the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities’. How does the IR measure up to that? 1/9
I wouldn’t claim that the Nat Sec Strategy and Strategic Defence Review I oversaw in 2010 was perfect. But we did for the first time set out a prioritied set of national security risks. We listed 15, in 3 tiers. In the 2015 NSS, that had grown to 20 but was still manageable 2/9 
Our top four risks in 2010 (another int conflict, terrorism, cyber and natural hazards incl a pandemic) all got extra funding in the spending review published at the same time. I would describe that as an integrated review, with ends, ways and means broadly aligned. 3/9
The 2021 review has dropped the list of priority risks. There is plenty of ambition in every direction, but little recognition of the need to choose in allocating finite resources (especially since the UK’s global influence has been reduced by Brexit) 4/9
The only example of a priority I found is that climate ‘will be the UK’s int. priority through COP26 and beyond’. Fine, but are all the others lower priorities? For example: to be a science and technology superpower by 2030 (measured by wordage in the IR this ranks high) 5/9
Plus, to be a soft power superpower, to ‘shape the open international order of the future’ (no small task), to be the ‘leading European ally in NATO’ while deepening our engagement across the vastness of the Indo-Pacific, and stepping up action in Africa and the Gulf. Phew! 6/9
On top of that, to be a force for good on human rights, a ‘global champion of free and fair trade’ (the fair has crept in since Johnson’s Feb 2020 trade speech), a ‘meaningful player in space’ and to ‘take the lead in the technology vital to cyber power’ eg microprocessors. 7/9
And finally building national resilience, including (less prominently placed than I expected at p93) ‘bolstering domestic and international action to address global health risks’, including the non-negligible task of ‘reform of the global health system’. 8/9
All of these are worthy aims. But there is no sense of finite resources, or of the hard choices (eg values/commercial interests as Mr Raab is finding). What will we do less of to free up resources for all the new priorities? The EU? But we are finding that doesn’t go away! 9/9
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