New world order: can Britain, America and Australia contain China?

In the space of just a few years, Britain has gone from China’s would-be best friend to part of a pact to counter it. When President Xi Jinping came to London in 2015, Downing Street pulled out all the stops. Xi stayed at Buckingham Palace, visited Chequers and signed — of all things — a cyber security agreement. The police went to extraordinary lengths to clamp down on protests by Free Tibet supporters and a Tiananmen Square survivor. Yet just six years later the UK has now joined with Australia and the US in Aukus, a new alliance designed to check China’s power in the Pacific.

Britain is no longer trying to stay neutral in the competition between the US and China. It has firmly sided with the United States. It looks as if the contours of the next 30 years of British foreign policy have just been fixed.

The new alliance is all about mutual interest.