Some within Britain’s diplomatic corps, however, have warned that the U.K.’s global role is already not what it used to be, and stands to deteriorate even further after it leaves the EU on March 29, 2019. “We’re not the same country we were in 1945,” Harriet O’Brien, a British diplomat based in New York, says in the BBC series. “In some ways, we don’t have as much influence in the world. So we do, I think, punch above our weight.” [...]
And when it comes to present and future world crises, British leaders have publicly grappled with not being able to command the same foreign-policy authority it once had. “We have to be careful not to overestimate our influence,” Hunt told the House of Commons last week when asked about Britain’s draft resolution calling for a cease-fire in the ongoing war in Yemen.
The last time Britain seemed so unsure of its place in the world, it had lost its empire after World War II. Then the American statesman Dean Acheson warned London against overestimating its power alone. “Britain’s attempt to play a separate power role … apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being the head of a Commonwealth which has no political structure or unity or strength and enjoys a fragile and precarious economic relationship,” Acheson said in 1962. “This role is about played out.”
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And when it comes to present and future world crises, British leaders have publicly grappled with not being able to command the same foreign-policy authority it once had. “We have to be careful not to overestimate our influence,” Hunt told the House of Commons last week when asked about Britain’s draft resolution calling for a cease-fire in the ongoing war in Yemen.
The last time Britain seemed so unsure of its place in the world, it had lost its empire after World War II. Then the American statesman Dean Acheson warned London against overestimating its power alone. “Britain’s attempt to play a separate power role … apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being the head of a Commonwealth which has no political structure or unity or strength and enjoys a fragile and precarious economic relationship,” Acheson said in 1962. “This role is about played out.”
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