The future of the United Kingdom’s foreign policy is the future of university research partnerships.
While universities are autonomous institutions and, within the bounds of the law and regulators, they can work with whoever they want – they do not set foreign, economic, or security policy.
These policies are also not always aligned and universities can find themselves marooned in a policy hinterland. For example, China is the UK’s single most important partner for research and student mobility. China is also the UK’s single biggest strategic risk in IP theft and industrial espionage.
Government’s have reconciled foreign and economic policy with a belief that engaging with countries with different ideologies of our own through trade, freedom of movement, and the free exchange of ideas, will eventually build a more liberal global consensus. In America, the story runs that after the end of the Cold War liberal capitalist states had triumphed and through engagement former communist states and autocracies of all kinds would move toward liberal capitalist democracies.
