The program to equip the Royal Australian Navy with nuclear submarines is in trouble. The takeaway: Australia must begin thinking now about what to do to avoid program failure.

Why has this situation arisen? First, the prospective program costs are enormous and have been badly underestimated. Second, industrial capacity is inadequate for the tasks of building and supporting a nuclear fleet. Third, the program lacks a powerful leader and an effective management plan to drive it forward.

And, strategically, the planned force of eight nuclear attack submarines (SSNs) armed with only conventional weapons would have minimal deterrent value on Chinese perceptions.

Building the submarines is Pillar 1 of AUKUS, the security partnership of Australia, Britain and the United States. Pillar 2 consists of other technology exchanges among them. It is in Pillar 2 that AUKUS may prove itself.

The United States is to supply three Virginia-class SSNs to Australia—two from the US fleet, which will have to be topped up with newly built vessels, and one straight from a shipyard. Australia has the option to seek to acquire a fourth and fifth Virginia. Britain is to design, in coordination with its partners, a new class, SSN-AUKUS, for the Royal Navy and Royal Australian Navy. The Australians are due to build units of that class to reach a total fleet of eight SSNs by the mid-2050s .

But here is the first constraint. How long does it take to build a new Virginia-class submarine? According to the Congressional Budget Office, the answer is nine years, due to supply chain limitations. Huntington-Ingalls Industries (HII) in Newport News, Virginia, cannot now build enough SSNs for the US Navy. How will it find capacity to build even more to cover acquisitions by Australia?

As well as competing for nuclear talent with General Dynamics, which is constructing the Navy’s top-priority Columbia-class nuclear ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs), HII is building nuclear aircraft carriers. Delays to delivery of the carrier USS Enterprise illustrate the lack of skilled workers for all the required nuclear construction. And the question of huge cost overruns in the Australian SSN program may not have been fully considered.

The first Columbia class boat will cost about $20 billion. Follow-ons are estimated at lower costs. However, the entire nuclear infrastructure is inordinately expensive. Australia must start from scratch. And, as Britain will rediscover, a new SSN class is almost certain to experience large cost overruns.

Maintenance, repairs, logistics, training and recruiting to maintain a nuclear navy are not cheap. While Australia will benefit from using US and British facilities, that will not significantly offset the costs. Plans to deal with these and other challenges are not fully mature.

The question of who is in overall charge is difficult to answer. There is no czar like Admiral Hyman Rickover, who ruled the US nuclear submarine program for decades with absolute authority. Nor is there a Vice Admiral William (‘Red’) Raborn, who did the same for the US Polaris SSBN program.

It is unclear that these obstacles have been fully digested in an overall plan for completing AUKUS Pillar 1. One practical outcome could be—and emphasis is on ‘could be’—the US selling one or two more older Virginias to Australia as an option.

Those who are more optimistic should think about Skybolt.

In the early 1960s, the US was contracted to build an air-launched ballistic missile as the centerpiece of Britain’s strategic nuclear deterrent. But the concept proved too difficult to engineer, and Skybolt was cancelled, leaving Britain scrambling to find a new way of sustaining its deterrent. Will AUKUS suffer the same fate?

Where AUKUS is invaluable however is in Pillar 2 and the technology exchanges that it covers. If managed and executed correctly, the leverage here is potentially enormous. However, matters of intellectual property, classification and trust are critical. Once these other issues are resolved, adding Canada and New Zealand (the two other Five Eyes members) as well as Asian partners may be wise.

What needs to be done? Without casting fundamental doubts on AUKUS, discrete thinking must start now to address these potentially program-killing issues. A Plan B that raises alternatives must be developed. These must include, if China is indeed perceived as a possibly existential threat, the option of Australian nuclear weapons.

Ironically, in retrospect, a better choice may have been building diesel submarines with long-range strike missiles and air-independent propulsion for extended underwater loitering. But that is no longer re-negotiable.

The crucial question is this: what impact will eight nuclear submarines, if they can be built and delivered, have on China? Unless nuclear weapons are to be carried, the effect will not be significant. And huge impediments threaten development and construction of the nuclear boats.

What is needed now is a plan to save as much of Pillar 1 of AUKUS as possible and to save Pillar 2 at all costs. This is a grim situation that must be confronted now. Otherwise, the spectre of another Skybolt disaster looms large.

The UK’s tilt back to the Indo-Pacific has had no shortage of critics, including in Australia, but it has achieved tangible results and has lifted Britain’s importance in the region. As the frothy post-Brexit rhetoric of Global Britain recedes, London is striking a more sober tone as it plans how to build on the tilt’s foundations in a manner resilient to political cycles.

The recoupling of Britain’s strategic horizons to the Indo-Pacific presents opportunities for Australia far beyond AUKUS, which is marking one year since the announcement of the optimal pathway to acquiring nuclear-powered submarines, provided Canberra calibrates for potential dissonance between the UK’s aims and resources. Canberra must also prepare for subtle changes to the UK’s approach to the Indo-Pacific if, as expected, Labour wins the general election there this year.

Officially, the UK’s Indo-Pacific tilt was a foundational phase that has been successfully completed. Launching the 2023 refresh of the UK’s integrated review of security, defence, development and foreign policy priorities, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak closed the books on the tilt by listing the UK’s achievements in recent years, which include becoming an ASEAN dialogue partner, acceding to the CPTPP trade bloc and bolstering its diplomatic presence the region.

Defence has provided the most eye-catching embodiment of the tilt, notably the visit as far as Japan of one of the UK’s two aircraft carriers, accompanied by Royal Navy and multinational escorts in 2021. But the real substance of the tilt in defence terms has been London’s rigorous pursuit of deeper partnerships in our region.

AUKUS gets the lion’s share of our attention, but the UK has announced defence roadmaps, frameworks and other initiatives with countries including India, South Korea, Singapore and Indonesia. Britain became the first country after Australia to seal a reciprocal access agreement with Japan, and will jointly develop a 6^th-generation stealth fighter with Japan and Italy. Many of these arrangements could yield benefits for Canberra, especially as Australia’s own defence cooperation with Japan is at an unprecedented level.

While Sunak has declared victory in terms of delivering the tilt, the Brits are not going home. This year, the Royal Navy’s littoral response group, a high-readiness force focused on amphibious operations, should exercise in the region with India and other partners. And a carrier strike group will again travel as far as Japan in 2025, which Defence Secretary Grant Shapps is calling the UK’s ‘flagship deployment’, reflecting the range of partners that will interact with the task group.

Longer term, the Royal Navy might upgrade its persistent presence in the region of River class offshore patrol vessels to more battleworthy Type-31 frigates. Astute class attack submarines are already visiting Australia on an increased tempo under the UK’s commitments to the AUKUS optimal pathway, and should, alongside the US, form a joint rotational force at HMAS Stirling in Western Australia from as early as 2027.

These fresh deployments complement the UK’s longstanding regional defence presence, including a permanent military footprint in Brunei and Singapore. An expanded defence attaché network, which includes a newly resident DA in Suva, is now being coordinated in Southeast Asia and Oceania by British defence staff hubs in Singapore and Australia. And an upcoming agreement with Mauritius is expected to allow the UK and US to continue using the Diego Garcia military base on the British Indian Ocean Territory.

In a speech in January entitled ‘defending Britain from a more dangerous world’, Shapps helps explain why the UK is investing so much of its precious defence resources in the Indo-Pacific. Shapps joined the dots between Iranian and North Korean military supplies to Russia, as well as the Putin-Xi ‘no limits partnership’, to argue that our adversaries are already working more closely together; therefore, as Shapps puts it, ‘to shore up the international order, we must be able to act globally’. This gels with the description in the UK’s 2023 defence command paper of SSN AUKUS, the nuclear-powered submarine that will be built and operated with Australia, as ‘a truly global capability’.

Shapps’ view also resonates with wider, although far from universal, international recognition of the links between Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic security, reflecting growing awareness of China’s coercive reach and the shock of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. As Foreign Secretary David Cameron told the UN Security Council in February, ‘if we give into the idea that one country can invade another with impunity, then we will be left in a dreadful situation where any country could face a similar fate’.

Robust rhetoric and defence posture aside, questions remain about how much of a stake any British government would have in an Indo-Pacific crisis or conflict where it lacks legally binding security commitments equivalent to the North Atlantic Treaty.

We cannot expect the UK to publish its war plans, but London has confirmed that its crisis planning covers ‘all levers of government’ in ‘a range of scenarios globally’, responding to a recommendation by a parliamentary defence committee that Britain work with allies and partners on Taiwan contingencies. In the same vein, while the threats are not specified, the 2022 Australia-UK 2+2 meeting of foreign and defence ministers (AUKMIN) committed both sides to a series of tabletop exercises, as well as information-sharing and coordination in the event of a regional crisis.

Whatever plans are made during peacetime, any UK role in an actual Indo-Pacific crisis or conflict would have to be calibrated against the security situation in Europe. Backfilling in Europe or providing maritime security that frees up US forces might be just as valuable as any direct military contribution in the Indo-Pacific. Even so, the UK’s increasingly visible defence presence in our region, which is coordinated to some extent with France and other European countries, should have a deterrence effect by—to borrow Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles’ phrase—putting a question mark in any adversary’s mind.

Sustained support at the top levels of the UK government will be essential to protect resources earmarked for the Indo-Pacific amid a cost-of-living crisis and pressure on the defence budget. Once commitments to Ukraine, munitions stockpiles and contingencies for overspend on the nuclear deterrent are factored in, the UK’s defence budget should rise by 1.8% in real terms over the next financial year, keeping spending above 2% of gross domestic product. But Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s caveat that defence spending will only be brought up to 2.5% ‘as soon as economic conditions allow’ feels out of step with the Shapps’ commitment to the ‘largest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War.’

Indo-Pacific policy and defence spending are unlikely to be key electoral battlegrounds this year, especially as opposition leader Keir Starmer has pledged that ‘never again will Labour go into an election not being trusted on national security’. Even so, conspicuous bipartisanship would help allay any concerns that allies and partners might have about the durability of Britain’s commitments. There is already plenty of common ground. Addressing the Policy Exchange think tank last month, shadow defence secretary John Healey said that the move ‘from a post-war to a pre-war world’ outlined in Shapps’ January speech was ‘deeply sobering’ and something that all sections of British society ‘need to take seriously’. Similarly, Starmer has consistently reiterated Labour’s support for AUKUS since it was announced in 2021.

In the same vein, we should be wary of misreading Labour’s call for an audit of UK-China relations, which is intended to provide policy coherence across government rather than roll back the clock to the naive excesses of the ‘golden era’. Laying out Labour’s vision for ‘Britain Reconnected’, shadow foreign secretary David Lammy advocated standing with Australia and others to manage Xi Jinping’s ‘authoritarian turn’. Lammy’s plain-speaking reflects growing bipartisan consensus about the dangers posed by Beijing that is rooted in British public opinion.

But there are glimmers of daylight between Conservative and Labour positions on the Indo-Pacific that Canberra must keep in focus.

First, Labour seems somewhat uncomfortable with the term Indo-Pacific, perhaps because it was ushered into British political parlance in the wake of Brexit. Labour’s shadow minister for the region, Catherine West, presently describes her portfolio as Asia and the Pacific, in contrast to the incumbent minister for the Indo-Pacific, Anne-Marie Trevelyan. While this seems minor, words matter. The strategic connectedness of the Indian and Pacific oceans is more than just a soundbite, which is why Beijing will keep trying to undermine the Indo-Pacific concept that Australia helped champion.

Australia and our regional partners needn’t lament a Labour government in the UK jettisoning talk of Global Britain or tilting this way or that, but now is the time to explain to Labour’s key foreign and defence policy thinkers why Indo-Pacific nomenclature has strategic resonance. Backsliding would be particularly saddening because London was relatively late to adopt Indo-Pacific terminology, wasting years prior to the 2021 integrated review grappling with incoherent rhetorical stopgaps like ‘All of Asia’, which left the UK flagging behind the likes of ASEAN and France, not to mention trailblazers like Australia and Japan.

Australian diplomats should also quietly remind Lammy that his plan to ‘build on partnerships with a rising India’ could hinge on the UK’s approach to the Indo-Pacific concept, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi is personally invested in, including through the Quad.

Second, Labour appears to be more sceptical than the Conservatives about the inseparability of European and Indo-Pacific security. In Britain Reconnected, Lammy accepts that ‘long-term strategic approaches to the Indo-Pacific, through arrangements like AUKUS’, are ‘an essential response to the shifting centre of gravity in world affairs’. But Lammy cautions that the UK’s Indo-Pacific commitments ‘cannot come at the cost of our security commitments in Europe or mean that we can safely ignore our own neighbourhood’.

Some of Labour’s scepticism probably reflects wider concerns about US overstretch and the priorities of a potential second Trump administration. In the same speech last month, Healey cautioned that ‘we face the reality that European allies must take on greater responsibility for European security, as the US increasingly focuses on China and the Indo-Pacific’.

Canberra will struggle to influence Labour’s view on the linkages between European and Indo-Pacific security while Australia also explicitly prioritises its own region, including adopting a narrow geographical definition of its ‘primary area of strategic military interest’. Concentrating defence efforts close to home is logical and efficient to some extent, but the interplay between regions must not be overlooked, including how outcomes in Ukraine will affect Indo-Pacific stability.

Whatever the political hue of the next British government, Australia and our regional partners can help smooth the UK’s Indo-Pacific recoupling with warm political messaging and inclusion in key forums and minilaterals, as well as practical military measures, like access to facilities and participation in joint exercises.

Thankfully, the UK’s Indo-Pacific tilt was never as wonky as it sounded. But as any tradie will tell you, a solid foundation is only as good as what you build on it.

The pathway to Australia acquiring nuclear-powered submarines, under Pillar 1 of the AUKUS partnership, assigns a prominent role to the UK, as the designer and co-builder of the future SSN AUKUS for the British and Australian navies. Britain’s commitment to forward-deploy a nuclear attack submarine (SSN) to Western Australia, from around 2027, has received less attention, but also carries potentially weighty implications for the UK, including its overall deterrence posture.

The decision to send one of the Royal Navy’s seven SSNs to the far side of the world was no small commitment for the British government to make, while under fiscal strain and dealing with the war in Ukraine. US Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday has said the US Navy will also commit up to four of its SSNs to the new Submarine Rotational Force—West (SRF-West), which will operate out of HMAS Stirling, near Perth. The addition of an Astute-class SSN to that total will give the Royal Navy a resident undersea presence in the region, plus an opportunity to train Australian submariners in situ and trial joint operational concepts with its AUKUS partners. But Britain will inevitably be the junior partner in SRF-West, which is likely to be a US-led venture in whatever form it takes, especially once Australia’s own Virginia-class boats arrive in the early 2030s.

Sceptics might therefore be tempted to dismiss a solitary UK boat as tokenism, a faint operational footprint in the AUKUS submarine endeavour, where UK equities remain stacked towards a technical-industrial role in delivering SSN AUKUS. A lone Astute-class submarine is likely to be expensive to sustain in Australia, given that it will require its own local maintenance and supply chain from the UK.

On closer inspection, the implications for the UK run deep. The SRF-West commitment is conceptually distinct from other UK defence initiatives in the Indo-Pacific, including expeditionary deployments. The purpose of basing foreign submarines in Australia, in the long run-up to SSN AUKUS, is to forestall the emergence of an Australian ‘capability gap’ by maintaining a sufficient regional balance, concentrated in a key category of military capability, and thereby hopefully dissuading China from resorting to force in the South China Sea, Taiwan or other maritime contingencies. Compared to the Royal Navy’s other experiment in forward deployment to the region, involving a pair of roving patrol vessels, the decision to dedicate an SSN full-time to the Indo-Pacific is more consequential. Submarines can perform other tasks, like intelligence-gathering, but primarily they are platforms for high-intensity maritime conflict. SRF-West is about deterrence, not engagement, and the UK will be an integral participant in that effort.

Much will depend on the concept of operations to be worked out for SRF-West, as well as for Australia’s future SSNs. For example, will they be integrated into US naval task groups, or tasked with solo missions, such as tracking China’s nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) in the South China Sea? Will their area of operations extend Indo-Pacific-wide, taking full advantage of SSNs’ speed and endurance? Will the British submarine operate as an ‘interchangeable’ asset alongside the US and Australian navies, per recent alliance rhetoric, or will Whitehall place caveats on what it can do, where and with whom? As a function of the UK’s Indo-Pacific ‘tilt’, British-led amphibious and carrier task groups will be passing through the region on a more regular basis. It’s fair to assume that the British submarine in SRF-West will be pulled into some of these requirements. Canberra and Washington are unlikely to object. And when Type 31 frigates eventually replace the Royal Navy’s forward-based patrol vessels, there will be more capable UK surface assets available in the region.

But what if deterrence fails and there’s an outbreak of conflict over Taiwan, or in the South China Sea, and US submarines in SRF-West are ordered to respond; would the British SSN also be committed in support? While that is a sovereign decision for the UK’s future political leadership, the fact of the vessel’s forward deployment in theatre alongside US and Australian submarines could make it more difficult to say ‘no’ than to an expeditionary deployment from the UK. Forward basing has a different dynamic, especially of a high-value asset.

Further potential implications flow from the fact that the UK and China are both nuclear powers. The 2021 UK defence command paper highlights numerous defence concerns around China’s military modernisation and naval build-up, but has nothing to say about its nuclear posture or capabilities. It remains to be seen if the impending command paper refresh will go further. Currently, the UK publicly articulates its nuclear deterrent largely in relation to Russia, as well as passing mentions of North Korea and (prospectively) Iran. It is hard to find any reference within UK nuclear thinking that entertains even a notional deterrence relationship with China. The matter is considered either too sensitive for public consumption or not serious enough.

And yet China now regularly tops intelligence-informed threat assessments in Britain. That hasn’t carried over to the Ministry of Defence, presumably because distance influences calculations of military threat to a greater extent than espionage or economic coercion. However, China is steadily its expanding nuclear arsenal (as, significantly, the UK itself is also poised to do). Meanwhile, Britain is drawing militarily closer to the US and Australia through AUKUS.

AUKUS members have been at pains to stress that Australia’s nuclear-powered submarines will be conventionally armed. However, deterring a nuclear power by purely conventional means is not a straightforward proposition, especially when SSNs operating from Australia could easily come into contact with China’s SSBNs, accidentally or intentionally. Unlike Australia, which depends on the US umbrella, the UK has an independent nuclear deterrent, so must make its own calculations about how to respond to a developing deterrence relationship with China. (If that sounds overdone, Russia’s recent resort to nuclear threats against NATO countries should give pause for thought.)

It is not clear that the UK has the capability to deter Russia and China concurrently. If a decision is made that the nuclear deterrent should also cover China, Britain may—for various reasons—need to consider extending SSBN patrols into the Indian or Pacific ocean, while it gradually expands its nuclear warhead inventory, from 225 to the new cap of 260. This may come across as a somewhat alarmist extrapolation from the deployment of a single, conventionally armed British submarine to Australia. However, ahead of that deployment it would seem prudent for officials in Whitehall to be weighing possible adjustments to Britain’s nuclear doctrine and posture against the entirely plausible future of a full-spectrum UK deterrence relationship with China.

More often than not, Europe is invoked in abstract terms, such as when politicians argue that European sovereignty is the only path to security in a world dominated by great powers. But as the original Brexit deadline of 29 March drew nearer these past few weeks, the idea of a European identity became more concrete; the political suddenly became personal. Behind the cacophony of parliamentary arguments over ‘backstops’ and ‘indicative’ and ‘meaningful’ votes, there are some 16 million British ‘Remain’ voters who are in deep fear of losing their EU citizenship.

Some of those Remainers no doubt participated in the march in London for a ‘People’s vote’ last month, which drew more than a million people and represented the greatest public outpouring of pro-EU sentiment that Europe has witnessed in years. I, for one, have only ever seen EU flags waved with that much passionate intensity in Ukraine’s Maidan Square in 2014 and in Central and Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism. But whereas those pro-democracy protesters were dreaming of a return to their European past, today’s Remainers are dreading a post-European future.

I share their dread. Having grown up in Brussels with a British father and a German-Jewish mother who was born in France, it is my European identity that brought unity and meaning to my family’s history. My relatives were peppered across Manchester, Luxembourg, Paris and Bonn, and one of the most influential people in my early life was my grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who was orphaned at the age of 10. To escape the claustrophobia of her conservative upbringing in Würzburg, Germany, she taught herself seven European languages. And later in life, she resisted the crippling pains of old age by reciting from memory poems by Dante, Heine, Keats, Kipling and Wordsworth.

When I returned to the United Kingdom as a student in 1992, I embraced my British identity and immersed myself in the country’s history and culture. By reading historians such as Linda Colley, Eric Hobsbawm and Norman Davies, I learned that British history actually has little to do with ‘splendid isolation’. It can be understood only as part of a European story.

The British elite have always been European—in terms of both identity and heritage. Belonging to the House of Windsor, Queen Elizabeth II is partly of German descent. Moreover, Britain’s language derives from Latinate and Germanic influences, just as some of its greatest literature is set in Italy, Denmark and Greece. And in the modern era, British leaders have always embraced a European identity when the chips were down. Even Winston Churchill, that great imperialist, was willing to sacrifice the trappings of global empire for the sake of Europe by declaring war on Nazi Germany and proposing a union with France.

More recently, Europeanisation has been transformed from an elite privilege into a mass cultural phenomenon. Thanks to falling travel costs, tens of millions of people on both sides of the English Channel go back and forth in each direction every year. Even in the remotest parts of the UK, supermarkets are stocked with Italian pasta, Greek olive oil, French cheese, Danish butter and Spanish wine. Some two million Britons have settled in other EU countries, while three million Europeans have taken up residence in the UK.

Back in the 1990s, I led an initiative exploring how Britain could rebrand itself for the modern era. The idea was to frame Britishness as a forward-looking civic identity rather than the atavistic ethnic chauvinism that former prime minister Margaret Thatcher had championed.

By emphasising Britain’s creativity, dynamism and deep historical connections to Europe and the world, I hoped that marginalised Britons—the young, ethnic minorities, Londoners, Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish—might begin to see it as their home too. To my surprise, the findings from the project were picked up by the governments of both Tony Blair and David Cameron. But 20 years later, the same groups of British citizens who were belatedly brought into the national story now fear that they will be excluded once again. Brexit Britain has become a place of narrowly defined exclusive identities.

After the referendum in 2016, my own fear of losing European citizenship led me to apply for German citizenship. Some of my Jewish friends have pointed out the irony of seeking refuge in the country that tried to exterminate my ancestors. But reclaiming a birthright that had been stolen from my family turned out to be a deeply moving experience. It was as natural for me as it was for my grandmother, mother, and aunt, who made the extraordinary decision to return to Germany in the 1950s.

My mother was a professor of German literature, so I learned early on about Germany’s painful reckoning with its past and its journey back towards European civilization. This, too, informed my European identity, which rests not just on the pillars of British and German history, but on a synthesis of hope and fear. When my grandmother taught me about the Enlightenment ideal of prizing reason above all else, she was drawing not from a distinctly British or German tradition, but from a European one. She also taught me to appreciate the idea of Europe as a refuge from our own family’s tragic history.

That, in fact, has been the motive of the European project: to engender shared ideals and prevent a return to the continent’s murderous past. The EU was created to transcend national histories of Nazism, fascism and communism. But today many people are so afraid of the future that they seek to recreate a national past that never was.

Still, one can find hope in the fact that the upsurge in pro-European sentiment in the UK is proving contagious. In the run-up to the European Parliament elections this May, record numbers of people are proclaiming a European identity. But as the political becomes personal for more people, the challenge will be to ensure that this European identity is inclusive and forward-looking, rather than hopelessly nostalgic.

The recent meeting between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Theresa May in the Estonian capital of Tallinn was a portrait in contrasts. Merkel has pursued openness and internationalism, and leads a country with a world-beating industrial base and strong trade ties. May talks more about the past than the future, and has disparaged ‘citizens of the world’ while claiming to defend her country’s confused national identity.

Among other things, the Merkel–May dynamic shows how cyclical history can be. Twenty years ago, Germany was the ‘sick man of Europe’, struggling to dispel its demons so that it could look out and to the future. The United Kingdom, on the other hand, had become ‘Cool Britannia’. In 1997, much of the world was tuning in to Brit-pop; and top British artists, fashion designers and architects were the hottest names in their fields. Even British chefs were seen as global arbiters of taste, to the chagrin of their French counterparts.

I had a walk-on part in that moment of British national revival. In the report Britain^TM: Renewing our identity, I proposed a strategy of national rebranding that was picked up by the new Labour government under Prime Minister Tony Blair. The idea was to rethink the idea of Britishness, and then reintroduce Britain to the world.

Rebranding was clearly necessary. By the mid-1990s, a fog of malaise had settled over British politics. Prime Minister John Major had lost control of the Conservative Party, and declining public trust in British institutions was fueling anxiety among voters. Britain, once known as the ‘workshop of the world’, had become a service economy. The British retail chain Dixons decided to name one of its consumer-electronics brands Matsui, because it sounded Japanese. The soap operas coming out of Buckingham Palace had turned adulation of the royal family into voyeurism. And according to opinion polls, around half of the country’s population wanted to emigrate, and a similar percentage (particularly Scots, Welsh, ethnic minorities, Londoners and the young) no longer felt British.

Rather than mourning the ethnic-based, exclusionary Englishness that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had done so much to promote in the 1980s, I argued that Britons should embrace a new civic identity, based on deeper stories about their country. Britain, after all, was a global hub, but also an island with a long history of creativity, quirkiness and innovation. It was a hybrid country that gloried in its diversity. It had pioneered social and technological change not with revolutionary fanfare, but through sound governance. And it was a country that valued ‘fair play’, a value embodied in the National Health Service.

Of course, I should not overstate the influence of my pamphlet. Britain^TM was just one part of a larger phenomenon. The British national story was moving towards openness, and that change would have a profound impact on both Labour and a Conservative Party that needed to detoxify its own brand. Conservative leaders such as Prime Minister David Cameron and even Boris Johnson, when he was the mayor of London, came to represent a modern, multiracial and multiethnic Britain. This is the Britain that the director Danny Boyle depicted in the opening ceremony to the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

How, then, did the country move from cosmopolitanism back to nationalism and nativism? The short answer is that Britain’s rebranding became a victim of its own success. By accommodating previously excluded citizens, the new national story made those at the center of the older, narrower version feel like a threatened minority. And when the Brexit referendum rolled around, they fought back.

May’s main goal since succeeding Cameron has been to appeal to the emotions of the old tribes at the heart of Thatcher’s version of Britishness—all who felt disenfranchised in Cool Britannia. Still, demography dictates that the new, open Britain will inevitably replace the old one. Most polls show that the country is becoming more liberal and tolerant every year. But one lesson from the Brexit vote is that identity politics—manifested in the fears of older, white, less-educated voters—can wreak havoc in the interregnum.

What remains to be seen is how far the nativist turn will go, and whether its leaders will overreach. Will the populist wave recede once a critical mass of voters starts to feel the economic effects of Brexit on the British economy? And could it have been prevented with a slower, more gradual change in the national story?

Similar questions have surely been on Merkel’s mind since Germany’s federal election last month. The fact that the far-right Alternative for Germany made unprecedented gains while Merkel’s own party lost support owes something to her bold open-door policy during the refugee crisis. She may now be wondering if the Willkommenskultur (welcoming culture) that she has promoted will share the same fate as Blair’s Cool Britannia.

Ensuring that it does not will be Merkel’s big challenge in her fourth term. Unfortunately, May, having ridden the wave of nativism, rather than trying to redirect it, will have little to teach her German counterpart.

If anything, May could fall victim to her own opportunism. If history does indeed move in cycles, it stands to reason that Britain will turn back towards openness sooner or later. And when that happens, May’s brand of backward-looking politics, like Thatcher’s, will be swept aside.