{"id":23334,"date":"2020-12-25T08:49:27","date_gmt":"2020-12-25T08:49:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/?p=23334"},"modified":"2020-12-25T08:49:27","modified_gmt":"2020-12-25T08:49:27","slug":"brexit-is-finally-done-but-it-already-seems-out-of-date","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/2020\/12\/25\/brexit-is-finally-done-but-it-already-seems-out-of-date\/","title":{"rendered":"Brexit is finally done, but it already seems out of date"},"content":{"rendered":"

It took 11 gruelling months for negotiators from Britain and the European Union to hammer out the terms of a post-Brexit trade deal. But in many respects, the deal is already 4 1\/2 years out of date.<\/strong><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

The world has changed radically since June 2016, when a narrow majority of people in Britain voted to leave the European Union, tempted by an argument that the country would prosper by throwing off the bureaucratic shackles of Brussels.<\/p>\n

In those days, the vision of an agile, independent Britain \u2014 free to develop profitable, next-generation industries like artificial intelligence and cut its own trade deals with the United States, China and others \u2014 was an alluring sales pitch. The buccaneers of Brexit promised to create a \u201cGlobal Britain.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was before the anti-immigrant and anti-globalist-fuelled rise of President Donald Trump and other populist leaders who erected barriers to trade and immigration and countries turned inward. It was before the coronavirus pandemic exposed the vulnerabilities of far-flung supply chains, fuelling calls to bring strategic industries back home and throwing globalism into retreat.<\/p>\n

In the anxious dawn of 2021, buccaneers are out of fashion. The world is now dominated by three gargantuan economic blocs \u2014 the United States, China and the European Union. Britain has finalised its divorce from one of them, leaving it isolated at a time when the path forward seems more perilous than it once did.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole \u2018Global Britain\u2019 model doesn\u2019t reflect the more protectionist, nationalistic world we\u2019re living in,\u201d said Thomas Wright, the director of the Centre on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. \u201cBecoming a global free trader in 2016 is a bit like turning into a communist in 1989. It’s bad timing.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Prime Minister Boris Johnson leads Britain into a post-Brexit future, he also risks being out of step politically.<\/p>\n

The Brexit agreement with the European Union comes at the very moment that President-elect Joe Biden is replacing Trump\u2019s \u201cAmerica First\u201d credo with a message of mending alliances and collaborating to tackle issues like global health and climate change.<\/p>\n

While the deal averts tariffs and quotas on goods crossing the English Channel, it is at heart about disentangling neighbours who had become deeply integrated over four decades. That estrangement, analysts say, is bound to weaken ties between the two sides in other areas, like security and diplomacy.<\/p>\n

\u201cBiden wants to see alliances and multilateralism and cooperation, and Brexit runs completely against that,\u201d said Mujtaba Rahman, an analyst at the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy. \u201cBrexit is graduating into a more difficult political context where it is running against the grain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump cheered Britain\u2019s drive to sever itself from the European Union. As a reward, he promised to negotiate a trade agreement with Johnson, whom he cultivated personally. But Biden opposed Brexit and has ruled out negotiating new trade agreements until the United States improves its own competitive position. That nullifies one of the prime selling points of Brexit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It took 11 gruelling months for negotiators from Britain and the European Union to hammer out the terms of a post-Brexit trade deal. But in many respects, the deal is already 4 1\/2 years out of date.   The world has changed radically since June 2016, when a narrow majority of people in Britain voted to leave the European Union, tempted by an argument that the country would prosper by throwing off the bureaucratic shackles of Brussels. In those days, the vision of an agile, independent Britain — free to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":23335,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[30,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23334"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23334"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23336,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23334\/revisions\/23336"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}