In 1949, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin wrote that the Middle East was of “cardinal importance to the United Kingdom.” Nevertheless, it is widely accepted that Britain has never produced or adhered to a grand strategy to guide its behaviour towards the region. This does not mean that British foreign policy in the Middle East has been aimless, only that it has seemed to lack core foundational principles, making it harder for analysts to pre-empt and plan for British actions. This chapter offers a different argument. Rather than purely ad hoc responses to events, it is possible to notice a quintessential Britishness in the country's Middle Eastern relations between 1945 and the new millennium.

To gain greater insight into what it means to locate a British grand strategy in the Middle East, this chapter employs an original approach to explore the intersection between grand strategy scholarship and National Role Conception (NRC). It then surveys British foreign policy towards the Middle East through the prism of two recurring themes: British concerns over losing the country's self-styled reputation as an honest broker, and a fervent distrust of any long-term commitments or attempts to centralise bureaucratic authority in Middle East relations. I point to the consistent value that British officials have placed on reputation and bureaucratic pluralism as evidence that there seems to be an underlying, predictably British ‘way of doing things’ in UK-Middle East dynamics.

What is Grand Strategy When There is no Grand Strategy Document?

Among scholars of foreign policy, the term ‘grand strategy’ is almost loaded. It has been contested and redefined by multiple authors2 and, as a result, is perhaps most useful when applied only to a narrow query in international affairs. In trying to locate a specifically British variety, I adopt Lindley French's description of grand strategy as “the organisation of large means in pursuit of large uncertain ends over medium to long time frames […]”. As noted by Jones in the introduction to this volume, investigating such over-arching principles demands more than discussing separate incidents in foreign policy. The attempt to pinpoint any state's grand strategy requires looking for consistency in its foreign policy making.