Always Up 🇪🇺🇬🇧🇺🇦

Andrew, forget for a moment the endless Brexit accountancy — customs forms, regulations, GDP fractions and whether one trade agreement adds 0.1% here or subtracts 0.2% there. There is a much larger question: where does British power come from? Churchill understood it perfectly. Britain was powerful because it stood at the junction of what he called the “three majestic circles”: the Commonwealth, the English-speaking world and United Europe. That was not sentimental Europeanism. It was hard-headed British geopolitics. For three centuries British strategy was based on one central principle: never allow the European continent to be organised without Britain having a decisive voice in its organisation. Marlborough understood it. Pitt understood it. Castlereagh understood it. Palmerston understood it. Churchill understood it. The object was never to escape Europe. It was to shape Europe. That is why Churchill could simultaneously be the supreme Atlanticist, an imperialist and the man who declared at Zurich: “Let Europe arise!” Brexit can be argued economically until the last customs declaration is filed. But geopolitically the question is much more profound. Sovereignty is the legal freedom to act. Power is the ability to make others act with you. Britain historically maximised the second, not merely the first. The great British foreign-policy tradition was never “splendid isolation”. It was ensuring that Britain sat at every important table — Washington, the Commonwealth and Europe — and could play one circle through the others. Leaving a table may increase your freedom from its rules. It does not automatically increase your power over what is decided there. Churchill’s Britain wanted both sovereignty and leverage. That is the argument Brexit has never satisfactorily answered.