The current Brexit hysteria is the usual mindless idiocy of financial specialists who don’t know anything about politics or strategic issues, especially when they unfold in foreign countries.
It will pass quickly and even if the U.K. does leave the EU, the economic effects will be neutral all round. The Treaty of Europe and its tenebrous thicket of a Constitution provides two years for negotiation, and despite all the huffing and blustering in Brussels, both sides will make a good faith effort to salvage as much of the relationship as possible while liberating the long-suffering British public from excessive Euro-regulation.
There is no element in this of British hostility to Europe-Britain’s hostility is to the arrogant, power-hungry, supranational apparatus in Brussels that is not accountable or responsible to the constituent states in the European Union or to the talking shop of a European Parliament, which has no authority and more interpreters than legislators.
In recent times, Edward Heath took Britain cock-a-hoop into Europe in 1972. He was anti-American and even banned U.S. intelligence flights from British bases in Cyprus in the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
When Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979, she proved a hard negotiator for greater economic benefits from it for her country. As the drive to make what had been an economic community into a politically united federation seeking “ever closer union,” she balked and her party pushed her out, in favor of people that would be more accommodating and less confrontational toward Europe.
All of Thatcher’s successors: John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and David Cameron, endlessly repeated that “Europe is coming our way.”
It was all a confidence trick, even if sincerely motivated.
Now Britain is back to the starting gate, but Europe will make some concessions to keep Britain, as the EU’s largest customer, accessible.
London will be more attractive than ever as a financial center, at least until the Obama reign of terror on Wall Street ends. The top tier of the old Commonwealth: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and India (conditionally on its seriously pulling itself together), would welcome a revival of some level of solidarity with the British, and as a group these countries have as large a GDP as China.
Any post-Obama administration would be happy to warm up relations with the U.K. The idea that Northern Ireland is suddenly going to change majorities and opt for union with the Republic of Ireland, or that Scotland sees a fast track to secession from the United Kingdom and entry into the European Union, is just morning-after moonshine.
There are superficial resemblances between the Leavers and the Trump movement: resentment of trade inequalities and ill-considered or illegal unemployment that generate unemployment, resentment of incompetent, disconnected, and disdainful government, and anger that patriotic values are ignored or even despised.
The United States has effectively squandered the immense strategic and economic preeminence that had been accumulated at the end of the Reagan era, and the United Kingdom has fumbled away most of the economic solidity and international prestige that had been amassed in the Thatcher years.
In the U.S., the centrists in both parties have barely retained control, as Mrs. Clinton has had to make a sharp opportunistic detour to the left to fend off the avowed socialist, Bernie Sanders; and Donald Trump had to go farther polemically than most people were comfortable with on immigration and trade, to scoop up the Archie Bunker vote, and to disguise the fact that he is a centrist and to the left of most of the other Republican candidates except Kasich, especially to the left of runner-up Ted Cruz.
A place where the Brexit vote should concentrate American attention is on the utter failure of U.S. foreign policy toward Britain and Europe for 60 years, except for the Reagan administrations. President Carter bought entirely into the idealism of European unity without, as usual, detecting the strategic implications, as the dream was largely fueled by a mad ambition to reconstitute Europe as the center of the political universe.
President Reagan, with his close association with Margaret Thatcher and strong leadership at the end of the Cold war, saw it all plainly.
But the Bushes and Clintons and Obama, as in so many areas, drank the wrong Kool Aid, and didn’t detect that a united Europe directed by undemocratic institutions run by almost anonymous people, could become a Frankenstein Monster, as well as an unreliable ally.
Conrad Black is a financier, author and columnist. He was the publisher of the London (UK) Telegraph newspapers and Spectator from 1987 to 2004, and has authored biographies on Maurice Duplessis, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Richard M. Nixon. He is honorary chairman of Conrad Black Capital Corporation and has been a member of the British House of Lords since 2001, and is a Knight of the Holy See. His most recent book is "Rise to Greatness, the History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present." For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
This article is excerpted from the original appearing in the National Review.