A Maritime Security Strategy for Chile

The United Kingdom recently published its national strategy for maritime security, a key element for a nation that has vitally depended on the sea since its inception. As an island territory with limited natural resources, its survival has relied on maintaining uninterrupted maritime communication lines, protecting its coasts from invaders, and the ability to freely exploit its natural resources, such as fishing and hydrocarbon extraction, while safeguarding them from third parties attempting to appropriate them.

The publication of this document coincides with an increase in tensions in Europe, particularly with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the geopolitical consequences it is provoking, in addition to the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union and the renewal of its interests in the Indo-Pacific region, represented by AUKUS.

This maritime security strategy aims to address security issues in that domain comprehensively, improving the interagency process to respond more effectively to threats and prioritizing the risks affecting that nation.

This strategy does not stem from an individual or random effort. On the contrary, it is subsidiary to the recent integrated review of security, defense, development, and foreign policy, titled “Global Britain in a Competitive Age.” This sectoral strategy recognizes that the maritime domain requires special attention due to the repercussions that its disruption would have on the well-being and development of its inhabitants and the State. According to the document, these disruptions can be caused by various entities and factors, ranging from traditional international actors to climate change itself.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the document is who is drafting it. The proposal is a joint effort among our counterparts in the Ministries of Home Affairs, Environment, Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Transport, led by the latter. This demonstrates that security, at least from the British perspective, is far from being an exclusive defense effort, involving a broader approach that certainly includes the defense dimension, with a focus on interagency coordination to address the threats that may arise in the maritime domain for the United Kingdom.

This maritime security policy emphasizes five strategic objectives, which are interconnected. These are: protection of the nation; response to threats; ensuring Britain’s prosperity; promoting its values; and supporting the maintenance of safe and resilient oceans. Each of these objectives is accompanied by statements of intent that clarify how the administration understands the meaning of each of these goals. In other words, they translate from a conceptual level to concrete effects, which are traceable and allow for the determination of progress levels.

It is worth noting that the document is framed within the guidelines of UNCLOS, meaning its strategic objectives are aligned with a cooperative concept of the sea, seeking to defend and consolidate the concept of the mare liberum, that is, the sea as a global common good, where free navigation and the exchange of goods and services are the norm.

It is not surprising that Britain is reorganizing its security and defense strategies. Its exit from the European Union (though not from NATO), Russia’s actions in Europe, and China’s increasing assertiveness regarding free navigation in the Western Pacific have affected the world order. For a maritime power like Britain, which vitally depends on keeping global maritime communication lines open, China’s strategic posture regarding its adjacent waters, combined with its particular vision of territorializing the seas and its desire to compete with the U.S., a historical strategic ally of Britain, has been seen as a systematic challenge to the world order, even rejecting resolutions from the International Court of Justice in The Hague on maritime domain issues, causing the good order at sea, one of the fundamental pillars of processes like globalization, to be affected. This change in the environment has meant that countries like the United Kingdom adopt new maritime security strategies and impose on maritime countries, like Chile, the need to think about and define them.