Even on its Own Terms Brexit Fails

The Brexiters claimed that somehow the access to European markets came with the opportunity cost of trading more with non European countries. They also argued they'd get more trade with the US this way.

Byron York, for instance, has the illusion that Brexit is about more trade rather than less.

"If policy on this issue is all that mattered, the protectionist Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown should be on Trump’s VP short list as well as Hillary’s."

"Of course, Trump is more robustly nationalistic than his left-wing counterparts. In his speech, he wrapped his case in the great nationalist cause of the hour, Brexit. But now that it has won the referendum to exit the European Union, the Brexit leadership is seeking exactly what Trump inveighs against — free and open trade wherever it can be had."

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/trump-makes-protectionism-great-again-214002#ixzz4D4QRNg6X

I'm actually less sure what the real differences between Right wing and Left wing autarky are.

I've come to realize that the Hard Left is very anti immigration as well.

For instance, the UK social democrat, Lord Keynes is anti immigration.

http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2016/06/jeremy-corbyns-fantasy-world.html

He claims that Keynes would have been pro Brexit. A claim I'm very skeptical of.

http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2016/06/why-keynes-would-have-voted-brexit.html

I think Keynes would have certainly been very critical of the euro system. But as for the EU as such, he'd as usual be for reform rather than revolution. This was always his way.

There is the time path dependent nature of policy where the best policy at year zero might not be forever the best policy going forward.

I wil grant Byron York this:

"Trump never says he opposes free trade as such. Few protectionists will ever avow, “Yes, dammit, I’m a protectionist — come and get me, copper.” They couch their protectionism in opposition to existing free-trade agreements and in the promise of somehow reaching wondrously different and better agreements — once all the existing ones are ripped up."

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/trump-makes-protectionism-great-again-214002#ixzz4D4RzZe6J

Protectionists always overestimate the ability to simply go from 'free trade to fair trade.' The trouble is that fair trade is in the eyes of the beholder. What would make deals seem more fair for first world countries will be less fair for third world countries.

Anyway, the idea that Brexit will lead to a lot more trade is a fallacy.

President Obama made it clear that Britain indeed is now at the back of the queue for the US.

I've heard some argue that maybe if this starts a march towards other countries leaving Europe, then this will increase the importance of the US-UK relationship again.

Already we are seeing that this is, as the Brits put it, bollocks.

Brexit pushes US closer to Germany

EU exit marks the final stage of a slow-moving transition away from the UK."

http://www.politico.eu/article/brexit-pushes-us-closer-to-germany/

You have to see the picture Politico puts up. It's with Obama, Angela Merkel, David Cameron all out strolling. Obama and Merkel are walking lesiurely side by side with Cameron out in front, trying to walk slow enough to keep with them.

Optics.

So the UK is making itself less rather than more politically important. This only makes the US-Germany relationship more important:

"When it became clear that Britain had voted to leave the European Union, President Barack Obama called David Cameron to offer his sympathy. Then he dialed Angela Merkel, the leader he actually leans on in times of crisis."

"It’s no secret why. For years now, Germany, not the U.K., has been Obama’s main line into European politics. And that’s why Washington’s influence in Europe will survive a Brexit."

"The longstanding “special relationship” between the U.S. and Britain gave Washington a key confidant at the table in Brussels, as Obama stressed in his April referendum intervention in London. But a Europe without a United Kingdom doesn’t exactly leave Britain’s former colony out in the cold."

“On the big issues, we’ve seen the transition for years now where the first call has not been to London, where it used to be, but to Berlin,” said Damon Wilson, a former senior director for European affairs at the National Security Council under George W. Bush and who is currently executive vice president of the Atlantic Council. “That transition has already happened and the great recession really accelerated that with the magnification of German economic and political power.”

"A decade ago, Merkel was one of the first European leaders to call for EU-U.S. trade deal talks (even though the German public now opposes the deal). In 2014, Merkel roped together reluctant European governments behind a joint U.S.-EU sanctions program against Russian President Vladimir Putin, which the EU agreed to extend last week. She’s been the leader in dealing with the Greek financial crisis and the millions of migrants coming into Europe."

"So rather than diluting American influence in Europe, it’s more likely that Brexit will expand U.S. reliance on Germany. That will be particularly true when it comes to transatlantic cooperation on Russian sanctions, the ongoing eurozone challenges and the flood of migrants into Europe — issues where Germany has already become the first point of contact for the United States."

"And Germany has taken a heightened role on everything from Ukraine to the Greek economic crisis, and despite strained ties with Obama over the NSA spying revelations to the fiscal response to the financial crisis, Merkel became “a kind of go-to counterpart,” to the U.S. president, a senior Obama administration official told POLITICO last year."

"Shedding influence"

"Meanwhile, domestic U.K. politics were leading Britain down a different path. Britain has actually been shedding its influence in the European Union for years, say foreign policy experts — undermining the belief that London gives Washington a leg up in Brussels’s affairs."

“The Brits have long had a minimalist agenda inside the European Union, and it’s not like they were looked to or seen as driving the agenda in Brussels,” argued the Atlantic Council’s Wilson.

"In 2009, to stem the flow of Tories to UKIP, Cameron pulled the party out of the Continent-wide center-right European People’s Party, which includes Merkel’s Christian Democrats and is pro-European. And the Brexit debate has distracted the U.K. from broader European issues. While the EU fixated on how to stem the flow of migrants and relocate those that had made it to Europe this past February, Cameron forced the European Council to spend its February meeting re-negotiating the country’s relationship with the EU."

"And by reducing its influence in Europe, some argue, the U.K. may have reduced its clout as a U.S. ally in Brussels. When Cameron invited Obama to London in April to bolster his anti-Brexit campaign, the president made the case that the U.K.’s EU membership matters for the United States."

“We have confidence that when the U.K. is involved in a problem that they’re going to help solve it in the right way,” Obama said.

"Dan Hamilton, director of the Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Transatlantic Relations in Washington and a former State Department official on Europe, argues that “the idea that the U.K. was the U.S. mole on the EU council is sort of denigrating to both countries.”

Still, he said, “the U.K.’s diffidence towards the EU for so many years diminished their clout,” he says. “Increasingly, U.S. officials have seen if you want to get something done in Europe you work with the power that knows how to work with the EU.”

And that, he says, is Germany."

http://www.politico.eu/article/brexit-pushes-us-closer-to-germany/

So what's clear is that domestic UK politics have lead the country to recede from world affairs more and more. 

And maybe contracting into Little England next.