Brexit was never fundamentally an economic project. It was always more about what it said on the ballot paper in 2016. Brexit was about ceasing to be a member of the European Union. Leavers understood that. Remainers, in contrast, still struggle with it.
Read Here |The Guardian
Britain clinched a Brexit trade deal with the European Union on Thursday, just seven days before it exits one of the world’s biggest trading blocs in its most significant global shift since the loss of empire. “Deal is done,” a Downing Street source said. “We have taken back control of our money, borders, laws, trade and our fishing waters.”
Read Here | Reuters
Although the economic implications of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) for the EU are modest, the geopolitical and strategic implications are not. With the arrival of a new US administration and the central role of China in the bloc, the EU needs to outline an Asian commercial strategy that reconciles the importance of China and the transatlantic relationship.
Read Here | Bruegel
The British government still needs to negotiate the terms of its future relations with the EU, a task so complex that many doubt it can be completed by the end of the year, when another ominous deadline looms. In the meantime, the country will be stuck in EU purgatory, bound by the bloc’s laws and regulations but powerless to shape them. Trade deals with other countries remain to be hammered out. And at home, the toxic fallout of Brexit division will linger…
EU officials want to set up a €100 billion wealth fund to bolster “European champions” against American and Chinese business rivals like Google, Apple and Alibaba. The proposal for a so-called European Future Fund appears in an unusually radical raft of plans that European Commission officials want to put onto the agenda of their president-elect, Ursula von der Leyen, whose mandate begins on November 1.
The U.K.’s government under new Prime Minister Boris Johnson has stepped up planning and funding for a no-deal Brexit, but many feel that contingency plans will not be enough to mitigate the fallout from an increasingly likely abrupt departure from the EU.
The politics of the European Union, however, look increasingly pre-democratic. In this new Ancien Régime – much as in the old one – officials condemn petty theft while absolving themselves of more serious crimes. Countries that wish to join the EU are instructed to scrub their institutions of corruption before they can even be considered for accession. Without the slightest hesitation, however, the EU now promotes candidates with a clear record of kickbacks and other dirty deals, as long as they are already senior members of the political class.
Though the biggest headlines of election night may have been of the Le Pen and Salvini victories, the story across Europe is that voters have mobilised in favour of change. A high turn-out in the European Parliament elections has resulted in a surge for smaller parties, notably greens and liberals, which has effectively countered the rise of far-right parties – preventing them from the kind of sweeping successes in the European elections that were predicted earlier this year.
Brussels has misread Beijing’s global aspirations – there is no grand plan behind Chinese acquisitions of European assets. But, as China becomes a stakeholder in Europe, the continent should adopt a pragmatic strategy to profit from this.
Trump has overcome internal resistance and external pressure to deliver an as yet uninterrupted string of foreign-policy successes : North Korea’s “Rocket Man” Kim Jong-un hasn’t launched a rocket in ten months; America’s NATO allies are finally starting to deliver on pledges to increase defense spending toward the 2 percent of GDP target agreed in 2006 ; Mexico has seemingly come to terms on long-overdue NAFTA reforms; the United States has stayed out of the Arab world’s interminable wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen; and the U.S. embassy in Israel moved to Jerusalem in May without sparking the Third Intifada predicted by Trump’s opponents.
