The Guardian view on foreign policy: thinking small when the rest are going big | Editorial
The UK is in the perverse situation of having no coherent foreign policy on the eve of completing an international negotiation that has consumed all of the government's energy. The situation is less paradoxical than it sounds, because Brexit is a project based on an assertion of what the country does not want to be - a member of the EU - without a clear articulation of what it should be instead. That omission will be felt keenly, but not discussed, at Sunday's extraordinary summit, where Theresa May and the 27 other European heads of government are expected to agree the broad outlines of a future partnership. But this "deal" will not answer the existential question that Brexit raises: if Britain's influence in the world is no longer to be deployed as part of a European project, how will it be felt?
The leave campaign did not recognise that as a legitimate question because Eurosceptics always saw "Brussels" as a hostile force and a drain on the sovereign power of a nation state. Brexit, in that view, offered enhanced status as "Global Britain". That fantasy, like so many of the leaver pledges, has been dismantled by events. The dynamics of a 27-to-one negotiation have demonstrated how a continental bloc asserts power greater than the sum of its parts and greater than any one European country can wield alone. Power in the world is not simply a matter of autonomy to sign trade deals. EU membership has been an axiom of British foreign and security policy well beyond the arena of economic cooperation. To jettison that arrangement would have been risky at any point in recent decades. With Donald Trump in the White House, the timing is exquisitely poor. Mr Trump has started a trade war with China that looks like the prologue to a long confrontation between superpowers. Traditionally, a US president would look to Europe for strategic alliance under such circumstances, but Mr Trump has also picked trade fights with Brussels and heaped scorn on the EU.
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