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Have you noticed the strange alliterative condition we live in now? As we _confront_ the _Coronavirus_ pandemic, there is a widespread_ consensus_ that the government has got lockdown about

right and that we should follow the guidance on social distancing. There is a spirit of _co-operation_ abroad which brings together the oddest _collaborations_; when a formula one

engineering team submits a design to a medical regulatory body you sense new ground is being broken. For a nation of notoriously querulous individualists we seem to have discovered

_compliance _as we parade like guardsmen at two metre intervals outside our local supermarkets. All of which conveys the sense of a society which _coheres_ in the face of a collective and

mortal peril and never more so than when it worships at the shrine of the one true faith — the National Health Service — every Thursday at 8:00 PM. Maybe this is what EM Forster’s injunction

in _Howard’s End_ to “Only _Connect_” should feel like; maybe we have attained an elevated sense of _common _purpose that will see us through the plague and to the sunlit uplands beyond.

There again, maybe not. Once the current distraction is over, there is every chance that we will return to the multiple enmities that have characterised our — and other — societies in recent

times. Remainer will still hope to eviscerate leaver; millennial will still whinge about boomer; trans activist and feminist will trade bile; the particular minefields of multiculturalism,

#metoo and identity politics will need to be re-negotiated and claims of anti-Semitism or Islamophobia will stalk the land. And that’s without even getting on to the Scots. But it could be

worse, we could be living in Macron’s France or Trump’s America. Both have strong claims for inclusion in the Divisiveness Hall of Fame, but it’s the 45th President of the US who probably

takes the prize. America has been unrecognisably polarised under his stewardship and a political method where mendacity, bluster, threat and the habitual avoidance of responsibility has led

to sulphurous divisions in every US institution from the Congress to the family. Strategy has become one of the most corrupted words in common usage. No corporate board is complete without

the obligatory away days to hammer out a form of words always quoted but seldom understood; equally, no self-respecting consultancy is complete without its phalanx of snake oil dispensing

strategy wonks. And yet it’s all so simple: a strategy is simply the route that links means to ends, mediated by ways. Or, alternatively stated, by defining what you want, shaped by what you

can afford and delivered by the cleverest mechanisms you can come up with. National strategy operates best in recognisable terrain where the distribution of global power is understood,

objectives are clear and the process is built on the solid foundation of national consensus. The process has probably never been better illustrated than by George Kennan’s “Long Telegram”,

written in 1946 at the US embassy in Moscow where he was serving as a diplomat. The telegram laid the intellectual foundation for what became the strategic doctrine of Containment which, in

turn, became the foreign policy handrail that guided every president from Truman to Reagan. It was written against a background where the global political structures of the post-war world

had clearly emerged, where the requirement to limit Soviet expansionism was the paramount objective of US national strategy and a confident American people were united in a wish to preserve

the fruits of victory. For the United Kingdom at the moment, none of these pre-conditions exist. The distribution of global power has seldom been more difficult to pin down and it is

interesting to note that many of the emerging ideas about the application of military force are about preventing things happening rather than making them happen. In the western Pacific, the

Chinese have developed a concept of anti-access/area denial (A2/AD as it is known in the trade) which combines cyber weapons and anti-satellite, cruise and ballistic missiles to deny

American access to the East and South China Seas, an approach Iran looks set to copy in the Gulf and Russia in the eastern Mediterranean and Baltic. But concentrating on sophisticated

military technologies implies the primacy of the nation state in a time when the existence of ISIS, itinerant militias, organised crime and big tech might contest that. And what would the

unifying strategic objective be? Perhaps the containment of China but the role of the United Kingdom would be marginal, even ambivalent as we struggle to decide the nature of our future

relationship through the Huawei and related disputes. Finally, it is the pure novelty of the Covid-19 consensus that shows us just how far away from any sense of shared national narrative we

have been operating in recent times. When the sense of what keeps us apart is stronger than the sense of what keeps us together we are in clear consensual deficit, and, without the unity of

a national narrative, is a national strategy even possible? Why is any of this important? It’s important because the people and government of the United Kingdom have set us on a course

where we have to undertake the most radical reappraisal of national strategy that we have attempted in decades, perhaps centuries. In terms of decades, two relationships have dominated

British foreign policy, those with America and Europe and both were thrown in the air in 2016 with the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump. In terms of centuries, however

ambiguous the legacy of empire is, it set a strategic framework that did not prepare us for the level of independence we are about to enjoy. Indeed, is there not something a little perverse

in a country that has always congratulated itself on the way the sinuous sophistry of its diplomacy has woven its intricate multilateral webs amongst alliances and partnerships now

celebrating isolation? Boris Johnson’s “To Do” list now probably comprises: beat the plague, get Brexit done and re-define our place in the world. How he will spend the time after lunch is a

mystery, but the first two — however tough — are susceptible to scientific and diplomatic method. The third will require a novel and challenging process beyond the experience of anyone

serving in public life. How much easier that would be if it had a basis in _consensus _in a society that _coheres._ He and the authors of the new strategy may look back wistfully at the

unity of the alliterative times we live in now.