Rafe Fletcher is the founder of CWG.

“We shouldn’t lose any more territory. Britain needs to be big. Look at a map. Britain is so small.”

So then British Prime Minister Tony Blair told aides Jonathan Powell and Alastair Campbell after the handover of Hong Kong in 1997. It was an anachronistic comment in a decade where the consensus emphasised physical geography’s fading importance.

But Blair’s remark looks prescient today. Size matters. Powerful countries are big, and they want to be bigger. Yet expansionist ambitions are about more than territory for territory’s sake. Take Russia and Ukraine, China and Taiwan, or America and Greenland. All very different contexts, but each expressing strategic self-interest on the part of the major power. From maritime access to security to critical minerals. Big may be better, but the familiar consolation offered to those less fortunately endowed holds true too: it’s about how you use it.

It’s something Britain scarcely references in the face of renewed Argentine aggression over the Falklands. Instead, the Labour government invokes international law’s principle of self-determination to defend the islands. It sounds noble, but a serious country should think about its self-interest in making such commitments. Drilling is due to begin on the Falklands’ Sea Lion oilfield next year and could transform the islands’ prosperity. But Britain renounces any claim on those resources. The Foreign Office describes Sea Lion as an “” to defence, adding that the Falklands’ natural resources “belong to the overseas territory”.

UnHerd columnist Aris Roussinos wrote about this strange disinterest last year. He described Britain as resembling “a cash-poor, asset-rich elderly woman who has somehow inherited a portfolio of scattered, high value properties she doesn’t know what to do with.” Any scrupulous financial adviser would tell the woman to put those assets to use or sell them. If Britain chooses the former, it needs to show more ambition. How about the Falklands as part of a South Atlantic hub? Constituting its other territories of St Helena, Ascension, Tristan da Cunha, and South Georgia, young Brits could emigrate to the sparsely populated region, easing domestic pressures on housing and employment.

That may sound quixotic.

But if Britain isn’t prepared to incorporate imperial legacies into a wider strategy, self-determination isn’t sufficient reason to keep them. Especially as it has prioritised reality over fealty before. Just look at the context behind Blair’s comments. Britain relinquished Hong Kong without consulting its residents because it was impractical to hold onto. Its lease was expiring on a majority of Hong Kong’s land and it faced a rising China determined to take the British colony back.

Either self-determination is sacrosanct, in which case Britain should have called a referendum in Hong Kong, and dedicated military and diplomatic resources to its retention if residents voted to keep the status quo. Or it is contingent on strategic realities. If Britain accepts that matters in determining what territory it can retain, it should also determine the value of what it has.

Instead, Britain’s inconsistent approach simply befuddles others.

The Times’ Washington Editor Katy Balls writes about the Trump administration’s “confusion that the UK cares so much about one overseas territory when they seem relaxed about giving another, the Chagos, away.” Allies are less likely to defend British claims when they are discordant and piecemeal, while opponents sense opportunity.

Blair saw that scale matters. Larger countries are more autonomous, both by virtue of their greater self-sufficiency and leverage in international arrangements. It’s why his ilk of EU integrationists argue so passionately for Europe to operate as a bloc. I heard fellow traveller, former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta, speak in Milan recently. Letta said countries can be “small and competitive” but they cannot be “small, competitive, and sovereign.”

The size of the world’s superpowers bears that out. But it obscures the futility of scale without competitiveness, of size without a coherent plan. Consider Britain’s approach to territory in its imperial heyday. It thought strategically about what it needed to hold onto and why; ceding America, for instance, so it wouldn’t be bogged down in an endless war at the expense of its more valuable Caribbean colonies.

I write this from another former colony, Singapore.

It ranks 176th in a list of 195 countries and dependencies by land mass. It was cut down to that size involuntarily upon expulsion from Malaysia in 1965. Yet it is disproportionately influential because it has capitalised on geographical blessings. British colonialist Sir Stamford Raffles first recognised its potential as a crucial port and modern Singapore built on those maritime advantages.

Its competitiveness and wealth as a global trading hub aren’t secured solely by geography. It required strategy in infrastructure and regulation to leverage that advantage. As that brings commercial benefits, Singapore also uses its position to accrue autonomy in other ways. For instance, it built Changi Naval Base on reclaimed land. It is owned by Singapore but has become a vital logistics hub to the US navy, to whom it grants access under an agreement renewed every 15 years.

Of course, it speaks to a distinct concept of sovereignty. Singapore needs China and America. Its model relies on outside capital and resources and the superpowers are two of its largest trading and investment partners. But it can at least approach larger powers with tangible leverage. It is a product of the foresight of founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. But Singapore, and the other great Asian wealth hub of Hong Kong, also owe something to British imagination in their earlier colonial iterations.

They display the great ingenuity of the British Empire. Much of which relied on the Whig insight, propelled by the Dutch example, that land could be more than Jacobites believed. Territory wasn’t just a finite target of acquisition, but valuable because you could do something with it. And as the British executed that at scale, it was the world’s pre-eminent power.

But a physically diminished Britain shouldn’t simply heed Blair’s words in clinging onto its remaining scale. It must instead rediscover a sense of national self-interest and utility in what remains. If Britain isn’t going to be big, it better figure out how to use it.