The Brexit vote delivered a sharp rebuke to the cumbersome E.U. bureaucracy and the Establishment in general, but it won’t solve the problems facing the U.K., Europe and the planet, writes ex-CIA official Graham E. Fuller.
By Graham E. Fuller
What an irony that Great Britain should be the one country in the world to deliver what could be the coup de grâce to the modern European order and to a meaningful Atlantic relationship. It is incredible that the population of the U.K. should have so thoughtlessly lurched into such a breathtakingly regressive, ignorant, narrow-minded and destructive act in our contemporary world.
However good the 52 percent who voted in favor may feel about torpedoing this major experiment in the making of a new European world order, their heads are firmly implanted in the sand (if that is what it is) as to what the realities of contemporary global currents are. These realities come with our modern world. Disliking them will not make them go away.
President Barack Obama greets Prime Minister David Cameron of the United Kingdom prior to a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office, Jan. 16, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
First, widespread large-scale immigration, both legal and illegal, is going to characterize all the rest of this century at a minimum. Destructive wars (including those launched by the U.S.), civil conflicts, environmental degradation (with some degree of Western responsibility involved), disease, health crises, lack of education, corruption, instability, bad governance, and the magnet pull of countries in the world that do work somewhat successfully — all of this will drive the refugee flow predictably year after year. It cannot realistically be physically stopped.
This is, in fact, the number one global security issue: only by taking bloated Western military budgets and applying large hunks of that money to some alleviation of conditions in the developing world can anybody begin to treat the problem at its source. Forget the beautiful walls, border guards, ramped-up sea patrols, or buying off Turkey to be a holding pen. Leaving the E.U. will not, in the end, make a whit of difference in…