 Thank you, Mike, for that very kind introduction. Can you all hear me to begin with? Because I have to stand here so I can use my laptop. Mike, thank you for that warm introduction, and thank you to Nick for funding this talk. I couldn't help but reflect on yesterday how beautiful this area is, especially when you start off in New York City in the hell that is Penn Station. You get the train, and suddenly the Atlantic coast emerges finally, and the tranquility and beauty of this area in fall. But of course, I'm here to talk to you about what's going on on the other side of the Atlantic in Britain, but not just Britain. Just to give you some background in terms of my own work on this, I've been working on Brexit now for the past three, four years. I really started back in January, February, 2013, when David Cameron, as Prime Minister at the time, gave a speech in London in which he committed the Conservative Party, not the government at the time he was in coalition with the pro-European Liberal Democrats, but he committed the Conservative Party to seeking a renegotiated relationship with the EU and then putting that to the British people in an in-out referendum. And I was based in Berlin at the time at the Stiftung-Wissenschaften Politik, and I was the only Brit at this institution. And I became a bit of a lightning rod for some of my colleagues who couldn't understand why Britain would want to endanger its relationship in the European Union, why Britain would want to go down this route again. They'd heard it plenty of times before. Britain constantly threatening, we're going to walk away. We're going to leave. We're tired of the European Union. We're sick of this. And my colleagues would basically throw back at me, don't you know what this would mean? Can't you imagine what it would lead to for the United Kingdom economically in terms of security and politically and so forth? And I'd point out, well, yes, of course, I know what that might mean for the UK. I have my own ideas. I've worked on this for a long time, but I quickly turned it round and I asked, what's it going to mean for you? What's it going to mean for Germany? What's it going to mean for the European Union? For Europe as a whole, if one of the largest member states decides democratically to quit. And I just received blank stares back. Nobody had thought about this. Nobody had given it much thought, partly because even contemplating the idea of a member state quitting the European Union was a taboo. It was just unimaginable. The EU is this forward moving, progressive internationalist project that could never really go backwards. It could never unravel. Yes, you could have different speeds of integration, but the idea of a member state quitting, I mean, it just challenged the whole idea. Plus, as I said, they were tired of hearing Britain repeat over and over again. We're tired of this. We're going to leave. Give us what we want. Now, Sir Peter Wesmercutt, the former British ambassador, was speaking at the Atlantic Council two weeks ago, in which he pointed out something which I remember from the time myself, which was some of his colleagues now, former colleagues in Washington, other EU ambassadors, pointing out, actually, maybe we should have taken your threat more seriously back in 2013 and the possibility of Britain leaving. Well, to some extent, yes, although this type of scenario brings out the scenario of the kind of the boy who cried wolf. Britain was crying wolf all the time, saying we're going to leave and the rest of the EU, understandably, became a little tired of that, thought, no, you're not, you know, come on, are you really ever going to be leaving the European Union? And therefore, nobody was kind of prepared for when the wolf of Brexit actually appeared and took everybody, including the British government, including most analysts, by surprise. I, if I put my political cards on the table, I supported Britain remaining a member of the European Union. I knew it would be close in terms of results. I thought it would be somewhere between 50 to 55% staying in. So I wasn't entirely surprised when it was a vote to leave, but I was still surprised that we'd actually done this on the night. And what I think my work has made clear over the last few years, and this is something I was very frustrated at in British politics, was the inability to understand that Brexit is not really about Britain, and this is something that's really coming home to roost now in Britain, that this isn't about Britain, this is about the European Union, it's about Europe, it's about European geopolitics, it's about the transatlantic relationship, and Britain is only one part of this. And what I'm going to do today, in about 45 minutes, is go through three series of negotiations that are now unfolding to give you an idea of the context within which Brexit is now going to be handled, and the problems, and the dilemmas, and the challenges, and the opportunities that now arise. And there are three series of negotiations or debates. The first is within the United Kingdom. Second is between the EU and the UK over what happens in terms of their relations with one another, and then the final one is what happens to the EU itself internally, and this is becoming one of the biggest issues. And it's the issue which I've been trying to argue for years should be the actual issue that people should not overlook in the UK, but understandably in British politics, we're more focused on Britain, and what Britain wanted and so forth, less so on what the rest of the EU itself wanted. So I'll go through these three areas, and I'll also draw out some of the, especially when it comes to the UK, the EU and the European dimensions, the actual international implications, the security implications, the possible implications for the United States, and for NATO. So the first set of negotiations are unfolding within the United Kingdom over what exactly to do now that we voted to leave. This was unexpected. The British government had done no contingency planning for a leave vote, or any contingency planning that had been undertaken had been very silent, very quiet in the background within the civil service. No one was prepared to contemplate in government actually leaving the European Union. But the most important debate, negotiation, argument, Rao, however you want to define it, is that first one up there, what I termed the Brexit narrative, to try and define what exactly on the 23rd of June the British people actually voted for and why they voted in the way they did. And this has caused an almighty Rao, because even though the question was, do you think the United Kingdom should remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union, and then you had an option of remain in the European Union or leave the European Union, as anybody who studies referendums knows, trying to break down a complex, multi-layered question such as Britain's membership of the European Union into a simple yes, no, black, white, remain, leave, in, out dichotomy doesn't always settle the issue. And it's certainly not settled in the United Kingdom. So there's a blazing Rao now going on within the UK of what exactly the British people voted for. Now, one way in which I try to understand what the British people voted for is to go back to a presentation I gave in June 2015 at SICE, it was entitled Why It Might Not Be All Right on the EU Referendum Night, and to go through a whole series of questions. I won't do this now, but to go through series of questions that I asked back then, which warned that actually this was going to be a very complex result, whatever the result was, whether it was remain or leave, and you couldn't be sure that it was definitely going to be one or the other, and it would throw up more questions than answers. So the first one is always the telling one, do you believe pollsters any longer? The pollsters kind of got it wrong, they didn't call the referendum right, they knew it was going to be close, one or two did. The betting markets, 75% of the betting markets thought Britain would vote to stay, and it stayed at about 75% until about one or two o'clock in the morning, when it suddenly became blatantly obvious that Britain was going to vote to leave and then it switched the other way. Things such as will David Cameron secure a renegotiation? Well, he did. He went to the rest of the European Union and over a very drawn out process, over about a year or so, he was able to extract some concessions for a new UK-EU relationship. They were not to the degree that he'd like, he wanted to be able to impose much more stringent restrictions on freedom of movement within the European Union in terms of especially Eastern Europeans coming to the UK. He wasn't able to achieve that, but he was able to achieve some things. So he was able to secure a renegotiation which the pollsters and history had told him would actually help him secure a referendum win for Britain to stay in the European Union. Because back in 1975, Britain had held a referendum not long after joining, in which we'd renegotiated our relationship in a bit of a sham way and then put it to the British people and they'd voted overwhelmingly in favour of staying in. He thought if he could repeat this, he'd win a referendum. He did secure something that was more substantial than I think the critics point out, but it was not to the level he hoped it would be. And therefore, when it came to actually selling this renegotiation to the British people, they didn't really believe him. The Conservative Party didn't believe him, the press didn't believe him. And very quickly, this renegotiation just fell off the agenda. He'd spent a year, incredible amount of time negotiating with European partners and then this thing just fell off the agenda. It was completely forgotten about, which is important because I'll come back to the issue of negotiating with the EU in a minute when I talk about Theresa May's dilemmas. So, was he the best Prime Minister to win an actual referendum? When he began, he was. He was a very big asset for the remaining campaign, but as the referendum dragged on, he became more and more toxic, especially him and the Chancellor George Osborne. What didn't help was that other individuals within government, such as Boris Johnson, who was one of the big leading leave campaigners and a real challenger to Cameron, decided to back the leave campaign. And the leave campaign almost presented a government in waiting, in terms of actually presenting an alternative to David Cameron and George Osborne, which tapped into a whole range of issues about frustration, about austerity, about spending on the NHS, about trust in government and so forth. And when people compare what's going on with Donald Trump with Brexit, what I don't think they understand is that Donald Trump and David Cameron were not the same kind of characters. Donald Trump was probably better compared to someone such as Nigel Farage, who has been over here campaigning with Donald Trump. If Farage alone had frunted the leave campaign, there's a very good chance that they would have lost and lost quite badly. It was that there were viable political figures who were considered very serious and hard-hitting from within the Conservative Party who backed the leave campaign that pretty much kind of did it in for Cameron and any hope that he could, on his own, carry this referendum. Who ran the most shambolic campaign? Who was the best at selling an unknown and who won hearts and minds? Well, arguably, the least shambolic campaign and the one that was able to reach out most effectively to the British people was the leave campaign. That was because it played on issues that had come to the fore in British politics over the previous several years, which the remain campaign wasn't able to tap into because it was very uncomfortable doing so, especially with regard to immigration. The leave campaign focused on immigration, issues about the NHS, national solidarity, austerity and so forth, and about the European Union being backwards and a shambolic thing and Britain should go out into the world. The remain campaign, however, focused on the economics. And even though it had the IMF, the Bank of England, the whole range of kind of authorities backing it on the economic case, that wasn't enough because the pollsters had already pointed out for about a year that when you looked at what the British people prioritized, usually the economy is number one. Then you'll get things like the health service, crime, education and so forth. Well, the economy had been competing with immigration for some time and about a year before the issue of immigration had moved ahead of the economy in terms of what most people in Britain were more concerned about. So in terms of backing the economy, they were gonna win on that in terms of a large chunk of the population. But by backing immigration and going big on immigration, the leave campaign was certainly able to tap into people's insecurities. I'll come back to that in a moment. Were the British people patronized? A good example of this is David Cameron himself. For years, British politicians have used the EU as an easy punch bag to score political points in the UK, including David Cameron. Even during the renegotiation, he was very clear that if he didn't get the renegotiation he wanted, he was prepared to back the idea of Britain quitting the European Union. Then during the referendum campaign, he comes out and says, well, actually, Britain's membership of the EU is an issue of high politics, of national security. It's existential questions about the future of the United Kingdom. But that left people going, but hang on, you think this is an issue of war and peace? But a few months ago, you were prepared to walk away from this. You know, you're being two-faced. You're being contradictory. You're patronizing us if you don't think we're gonna see through this. So Cameron couldn't kind of square the message that he was trying to sell to the British people based on what he'd said before. He was reaping in some respects what he had sown in the past. Was the referendum really about Europe and will Scotland be a factor? Well, as always, the referendum became a whole host of things with immigration probably becoming the first among equals of issues that emerged in terms of the defining things. Will European vote events sink a referendum? Yes, to a certain extent they did. Back in the 1970s, it was easy to sell the European Union or the European economic communities it was then. It was the project of the future. This was how the world was going to integrate. It would give Britain a boost. It was also, I think we forget about Western security. Only I think a month before Britain voted in the 1975 referendum, the world had witnessed the fall of Saigon. So it was a case of, is the Western capitalist world losing a bigger fight and should Britain being this economic community that from the left's perspective was this capitalist free market endeavour, which the Conservatives at the time backed. Today, the European Union is not seen like that. The European Union is seen as shambolic, it's falling apart, it's struggling. Part of that is a very negative political message in the UK. Part of it is true. If you look at the state of the European Union, it's very difficult to go and knock on doors in deprived neighbourhoods across the UK and try and sell the idea of European integration to people who've been left behind economically and in terms of identity politics. And then will it kill off the issues in terms of never-endoms? If the vote had been to remain by 52-48, then there's a very good chance we will be having rows right now about when the next referendum would be in terms of having another vote on whether Britain wants to stay in the European Union because the EU itself would continue to evolve and at some point in the future, British politics would be back at the point at which it needs to address this question again of whether the British people are happy being in the EU. The question now arises, are the British people going to get a second vote on whether or not they definitely want to leave? As sometimes happens in European politics, if a treaty is rejected, they're asked to vote again. Will the British people be asked to vote again in another referendum? No, is my answer to that. Calling a referendum in Britain depends upon the Prime Minister and the government being willing to do so and it took almost 10 to 15 years of hard campaigning by the Eurosceptic campaigns in the UK to get to the point of having a referendum in Britain. So the idea of having another one in terms of the pro-European campaign now forcing that onto the agenda is pretty unrealistic. Will we have a general election on this issue? No, the next general election is not due until May 2020 and calling an early general election is nigh on impossible now. It would require essentially the Labour Party to vote for suicide given its opinion polling ratings at the moment and the Labour Party is not going to do that. You'd need about two thirds of Parliament to call an earlier general election or for Theresa May to essentially call a vote of no confidence in her own government. She could do that, but that's a very difficult thing to do today. So the idea of having another general election, no, not until May 2020. That doesn't mean we're not going to have further votes. There will be votes in some regards in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, possibly in the Scottish Parliament because constitutionally we may have to consult the Scottish Parliament over certain devolved matters. There may even be a vote within the Irish Parliament over the Britain's connections with Ireland, over the Good Friday Agreement, which is an international treaty to allow Britain to get out of aspects of that. So there will be other votes, but almost certainly not votes that actually go out and ask the whole British people. Now, one issue which I think we should bring out here and which, again, you see sometimes in the United States is the correlation between kind of left behind voters and people who are angry, not about the European Union, but about the economy, about globalization, about being left behind culturally and economically within the United Kingdom. And I'm not too sure if this map is very clear, but this is from a report that was published only a few days ago from the Centre for Cities, which compares British cities with cities around the rest of the European Union in terms of productivity, in terms of patents and so forth. And this, I think, is one of the most telling things, which they certainly pointed out and which anybody who travels outside London would certainly notice, which is the north of England, which is where I'm from. I'm from the northwest from a town called Crue, which is where Bentley motorcars come from, just south of Liverpool and Manchester. The whole of the north of England is the swathe, as you can see, of yellow, which in GVA gross value added per worker is 30 to 44,000 pounds. But then if you look at it on a pan-European map, actually it's kind of similar to actually what you find in Eastern Europe. Large swathes of the north of England, large swathes of areas that voted very strongly for leave, are almost economically in terms of prosperity, in terms of productivity, comparable to large areas of Eastern Europe. The big difference, of course, if you look, you can see the focus of green is down there in the southeast, and especially around London. That one blip in Scotland is Aberdeen, which is connected to the oil industry there. So there's a big focus down in the south and especially around London. So within the United Kingdom, the referendum drew out these internal tensions between people who are angry at being left behind economically, but also angry at being left behind in terms of identity. And this is where I come on to what I term the London question. I have now lived in London for pretty much at least half of my adult life. I'd like to think of myself more as a Londoner now than somebody who's from Krew. But London is not the United Kingdom. London is now this globalized city where the white British population has gone down from about 90% in the 1970s to about 45% today. So London has changed radically, but at the same time it's booming. It's rich, it's young, it's dynamic, it's winning the race and globalization. And one of the biggest issues for my money within the EU referendum that came out was that a lot of people were also voting against London and against the metropolitan internationalist elite that are the British government and British politicians located in London that are closely connected to the European Union project and so forth. So there's this tension within the UK, not just over Scotland, which I'll come back to in a moment, or Northern Ireland and Wales, but within England itself with regard to London being this place that a lot of people feel very uncomfortable with. And the referendum certainly brought out English nationalism within England. There's a correlation between if you're very English in terms of your identity, you're more likely to be Eurosceptic. If you identify more as being British, you're more likely to vote remain. That's not a guarantee in terms of how people will view themselves, but London has a very British identity, very internationalist identity. Large swathes of the rest of the United Kingdom had a very English identity, especially in areas of the north of England and so forth. And so you could see this kind of connection coming out. London, just to give you an idea, it's 12% of the population, so it's the most populous area of the UK. From that, it generates about 22, 23% of the UK's economy and about a third of all UK taxes are raised from London. That causes a problem that I'm gonna come back to later in terms of the UK's balance in terms of its actual outlook on the world, because London pretty much shapes a large amount of UK politics in terms of its international outlook, but that's not necessarily the outlook of the UK. So just coming back to these debates, so is the United Kingdom a United Kingdom? Well, we'll come back to Scotland in a moment. I've decided to leave that until later. Next comes the UK-EU negotiation. So Britain is having this blazing row about what it wants in terms of, well, what it's voted for and what it means and how Britain identifies itself and so forth. But then that has to play into what the UK wants to seek with its EU partners in terms of negotiating an actual exit and new relationship. And there are several negotiations going on here. First, the exit agreement. This is easy-ish. Theresa May has said that she will trigger what's called Article 50 of the EU's treatise next March, April, which is the two-year timeframe in which a member state can negotiate an exit from the European Union. During those two years, you only really are supposed to negotiate the exit. And the exit is about pensions, it's about Britain's contributions to EU projects, it's about what happens to British staff in EU institutions, what happens to some EU laws and so forth. So that's kind of easy, although people have only just woken up to the fact that Britain may have a 20 billion pound bill to pay in terms of things it's committed to within the European Union, but which, in quitting, it's still committed to, and it's actually signed on the dotted line. So exit might not be that easy, but within two years, it's plausible. The next thing, and the biggest problem, is what new relationship the EU wants, or the UK wants with the EU. Theresa May said when she became Prime Minister that Brexit means Brexit. Well, no one's entirely sure what that means. I think Stephen Larrabee, if I've got the name right, of the New York Times said that's like saying to a toddler that bedtime means bedtime. You know there will be a bedtime. You know the child will eventually go to sleep. Where it will go to sleep, how and at what time is an entirely different matter. So Brexit means Brexit, okay, as a holding comment, as a holding commitment back in July when she became leader of the Conservative Party and therefore Prime Minister, that was fine, but time is now running out for her in terms of defining what Brexit is going to mean in terms of what she wants from the rest of the EU. And that's not gonna be easy for her to negotiate because if you look at, say, the UK-EU new relationship, the participants, she is not just negotiating with the EU on its own. This is a mistake, British politicians and the British debate that's often been in. You don't negotiate with the EU as one collective single thing. You debate with 27 governments, each with their own individual domestic processes of ratification, each with their own domestic political calculations. On top of that, you've got the European institutions, such as the European Parliament, the European Commission, even the European Court of Justice. They are fighting to make sure that they are heard. The European Parliament has made very clear it will not go quietly in terms of into any agreement and the European Parliament will have to agree to any new relationship. And we've just seen what could happen here with the Canadian-European trade agreement that has just run into problems in, I think it's Wallonia, which is one of the regions of Belgium. As the Belgium Deputy Prime Minister pointed out to me at an event we were speaking at a few months ago, depending on the type of deal Britain seeks with the European Union, Belgium may have to seek agreement of all seven of its parliaments. So you suddenly realize just one of them, one referendum, one parliament, one court, say the German Court or even the European Court of Justice, could suddenly shoot down whatever deal Britain manages to negotiate with the rest of the EU. So Theresa May is in a real dilemma here. I mean, what can she actually secure when she looks ahead with the rest of the European Union? But there's a problem here, an even bigger problem. What Theresa May actually believes herself about Brexit? This is not clear. At the beginning of summer, I began with a friend of mine, a project in which we began to map out all the different possibilities for Brexit negotiations. When you were younger, do you remember reading the kind of the choose your own adventure books where you got to the end of a page and it said, if you want to go left, get a page 89, right, page 73. And the story unfolds with different endings. And we tried to do one for choose your own Brexit adventure in which you played Theresa May. Now, during the campaign, she was on the remain side, but she only ever gave one speech in favor of remaining in the European Union. She kept her power to dry. She came, she was very quiet. Her leading special advisor, I think went to work for the leave campaign. So she was hedging her bets in a way. So when she became Prime Minister, it was a case of, okay, Theresa, what did you actually believe in? And that's the first question. When my friend and I were plotting the whole thing, we had to begin with page one, you are Theresa May. Do you believe in Brexit? That would color the entire book in terms of if you went, yes, you went one way, no, you went the other way. So what does she actually mean about, does she actually believe? Does she believe in Brexit because she's often been portrayed as a Eurosceptic. She's often been portrayed as very hard right when it comes to immigration, but then even she has let slip in interviews and so forth that she privately didn't agree with some of the immigration restrictions that her government, that David Cameron's government were trying to impose and that she had to implement. So she's always been a bit of a kind of a dark horse on this. We've never been quite clear what she meant. And she came through the leadership race without actually making much of an effort. Everybody else just stabbed each other in the back. Which leaves us with the road to Brexit and where she's actually going to take us. Now again, when you map out these different scenarios, you come out with lots of possibilities in terms of where it may be shot down, whether it's in the Lithuanian parliament, whether it's a Dutch referendum and so forth, whether it gets caught up in problems within the UK, whether the European Court of Justice decides to drag this out. And the problem for Theresa May is she's supposed to negotiate this deal in two years. And there is a huge degree of naivety in the United Kingdom about negotiating international agreements and international treaties. Britain has not negotiated an international agreement such as a trade deal since the early 1970s. So you hear people in Britain saying, why can't we negotiate all these trade deals in two years? We're going to do wonderful deals with Australia and the United States and so forth without appreciating that these things take a long time. Some of them can be done very quickly, but some of them will take a hell of a long time. And I'm going to give Theresa May some slack here. I'm going to cut her a bit of slack because I believe that when, if you put yourself in her shoes, and she does wear some very, very distinct shoes, she's very famous for that, and you look at the world from her perspective from Downing Street and where she could possibly go, she has fallen back on the, basically the lowest common denominator, the kind of the lowest option, which is the hard Brexit WTO membership. So if you hear this term, a hard Brexit, it means that Britain is not going to stay part of what's called the single market, which all the way through the campaign, people were talking about the importance of the single market and that Britain would secure access to the single market by staying in something called the European Economic Area, which would provide Britain with access to this and so forth. If you think about all those options that in the minefield, the diplomatic minefield she faces, what she's realized is she can't do this. She's looked at what happened to Cameron in the renegotiation. She's looked at how long these things take to negotiate. She's looked at the problems the European Union itself faces in negotiating these things. CETA, for example, the Canadian trade deal is dying basically from a thousand cuts, possibly from the member states. TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, is almost certainly going to go the same way. The EU won't open the Pandora's box of negotiating a new treaty. Why? Because they fear the type of vote that we saw in Britain in terms of voting down a new treaty. But then if you put a Brexit deal to the rest of the European Union, it's likely to go the same way. It's likely to get caught up in the same kind of political opinions that drove the Brexit vote. So Britain isn't going to get a good deal. So my analysis of what Theresa May has done is she, as the captain of the ship of state, has decided she can't get round this storm and she accepts, and her chancellor and everybody has said, there will be an economic cost, maybe more drawn out than we think. But what the hell? We're going to have to ride out this storm. So she's set the ship's wheel to dead ahead through the storm. She's got no other issues. She can't go round it. She can't negotiate with this storm. She's tying herself to the mast and hoping that the ship goes through and at the other side it emerges, battered, bruised, worn. She may have lost a few men overboard, especially people like Boris Johnson, Liam Fox and David Davis, who are the prominent Brexiteers, who may be the four guys if anything goes wrong. She may lose a deck called Scotland, but nevertheless the ship is still afloat and she's still the captain. That's her only option. And that's telling in two regards. One, she doesn't have a strategy. It's just hoping for the best now. And hoping maybe that in seeing Britain heading into this storm, the rest of the EU realizes that there's a storm waiting for them as well in terms of economic costs for the EU. But it's more so for the United Kingdom. So she's hoping the rest of the EU will move because she's basically saying, look, I have no other options. And secondly, it's telling about the European Union as well. The EU can't actually negotiate a good deal with the United Kingdom. It's scared about its own unity. It's worried about fragmentation within itself. And it's worried as well about Britain dividing and ruling. 27 member states don't want to find Britain pressuring them in different ways and causing divisions within the rest of the EU where they have a bit of a falling out in terms of how to approach the UK because this will be a very complex series of negotiations. So finally we come on to, sorry to leave it this long, the actual security implications. First of all for the UK. Most clearly the questions of Britain's or the geopolitics of the British Isles are now in question again. Most clearly the supplies to Scotland. The areas of the UK that voted most strongly remain were Scotland, Northern Ireland and London. And I've already touched on London. So it's a question of Scotland here. The Scottish voted I think it was 62% to remain. So it was a clear result to stay in the European Union. That doesn't mean the Scots are these committed Eurofiles. One of the biggest problems during the Scottish independence referendum back in 2014 was the idea of giving up the pound and possibly being forced to adopt the Euro. I think some opinion polling back in 2014 showed support for the Euro at around 6% of the Scottish people. So the Scots view the Euro as just as toxic as anyone else within the United Kingdom. Nevertheless the Scottish Nationalists have used this as the opportunity to start exploring the idea of a second referendum. Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish Nationalist, First Minister of Scotland, said the other day that she would publish for consultation the bill to bring forward a new independence referendum. Brexit makes Scottish independence politically more likely but practically far more difficult. What the Scottish Nationalists offered in 2014 was independence light. That Scotland would continue to share the Queen, the BBC within the European Union, the pound and everything and so forth. It would almost be a soft exit from the United Kingdom's single market and union. That now is almost impossible. There is the possibility there will be a hard border between Scotland and the rest of the UK if Britain isn't in the European Union and Scotland is. It almost certainly means that Scotland will be forced to commit to joining the Euro. We'll probably have to, it will be in a real dilemma in terms of can it keep the pound in terms of sharing a currency with a country that's no longer in the European Union and the practicalities in terms of negotiating this are real nightmarish. Scotland is within two single markets. It's within the UK single market and the EU single market. And the vast majority of its trade is with the rest of the UK and a smaller proportion is with the EU. So economically this could cost Scotland and the oil price is so low now that Scotland would be in a real financial difficulties. Nevertheless, politically this has made it more viable that if the British or the English or large areas of non-London England are prepared to commit to leaving the European Union for political reasons such as immigration, sovereignty and so forth and why can't Scotland go it alone outside the United Kingdom? That clearly raises a question about nuclear weapons. I'll come back to you in a moment. Northern Ireland is the other concern here. It voted remain. There are concerns here about one about the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland. If that border has to be sealed and we go back to a kind of a sealed border then what happens to the UK, Irish common travel area? This raises questions about what some of the groups in Northern Ireland who used to be kind of terrorist groups who've gotten into crime, who've got into organisations that are kind of pan-Iran in terms of their operations. What happens then? Does this stoke them in terms of politically and provoking them to come back? Is there a real possibility of Irish terrorism returning to the mainland of the United Kingdom? Given really in most areas of the United Kingdom in Great Britain and England, Wales and Scotland Northern Ireland kind of falls off the mental map. You don't hear about shootings. You don't hear about some of the ongoing tensions within Northern Ireland. And the EU has often provided a very powerful background factor, especially for the Irish Republic in terms of being able to consider itself an equal to the United Kingdom. And the Irish, more than any other country, are worried about a British exit, not just for economic reasons, not just for the security reasons, but just for their standing in the world. I was at an event in Washington a few months ago where a French academic said, well, now that British are leaving the European Union it means that Europe starts and ends at Calais. And you can imagine how the Irishman in the room reacts to that. It's like, well, what? We're going to be living in the shadows once again of Britain instead of actually coming out from behind us. And then questions of its unity. If the first aim of any country is to maintain its unity then, Brexit, may be the single biggest challenge to the unity of the United Kingdom since, say, the Easter Rising of 1916. But as I said, we shouldn't overplay Scottish pro-Europeanism. It may be that an independent Scotland seeks whatever deal the UK gets in terms of exiting the EU because there is quite a degree of Scottish euroscepticism sometimes even within the Scottish nationalists. They point to Norway and say, Norway's outside the EU. Why can't we live outside it? If Scotland were to go, as I'm sure you're all more than aware, that endangers Britain's nuclear weapons system, which are based at Faslane and more importantly at Coldport, the actual storage unit. Moving Trident from outside of Scotland to somewhere else within England is considered incredibly expensive, not really viable, very long term, 20 years and so forth. So there's a lot of speculation that again, Trident has been put, big question mark has been put over Trident's future. Britain's government has now decided to move ahead with replacing with the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system. It could be that we could find ourselves in five, six years time having spent a large amount of money and then finding ourselves in a real pickle because Scotland is voted for independence. So the nuclear weapon question has come up again. The economics, the fall in the pound sterling since June has cost the British government and the MOD a certain amount of money because Britain imports a large amount of military equipment, so therefore paying for defences become a bit of an issue. Okay, the pound fluctuates all the time and to some extent we can get better deals sometimes depending on who wants to invest in the UK, but already we've felt a pinch. Depending on what you believe in terms of the economic impact of a British exit from the EU will be, some project a far more kind of significant reduction in Britain's GDP over the next 10 to 20 years, some project a small more limited or some project even kind of growth. That will obviously influence British defense spending where Britain, okay we spend the 2% of NATO guidelines, but it's always a bit of a tough job to meet this especially at the moment. The government has relaxed austerity partly in reflecting on the possible costs of Brexit and that they can't continue to cut down on government spending to try and bring down the budget deficit, but there may be in the long run some costs that when you look back at it over a 40, 50 year period means, okay Britain didn't order six ships, it only ordered three, it didn't maintain these regiments, they were amalgamated and so forth. So there could be some costs in the longer run but it's incredibly difficult to see where it goes. And UK attention, British government is going to be obsessed with Brexit for the next few years. The foreign office, the Department for International Trade, the Department for Leaving the European Union and the Prime Minister herself are going to be consumed with negotiating this very complex set of arrangements, not just with the EU, but within the United Kingdom. So is Britain going to have the attention to pay to other developments around the world? That's not necessarily guaranteed, Britain is certainly going to be kind of consumed with this domestic matter that is, let's not forget, it has brought down, it brought down David Cameron, it plagued John Major, it harassed Tony Blair, it was a thorn in Gordon Brownside, it brought down Mrs. Thatcher and now Theresa May is wrestling with it as well and I would not be surprised if Theresa May loses her premiership over the issue of Europe in some way. Then finally and then the European operations and the European side of this, Britain does contribute to the small number of European military operations that go on around the world. It could probably, depending on what's agreed in terms of a UK EU divorce, continue to do so, the United States contributes some to these operations, but not military, the United States only contributes civilians to these operations. So this plays into what the European Union wants in terms of its own military ambitions. A few weeks ago at a summit in Bratislava, the European Union in facing Brexit decided to emphasise the creation of more European defence capabilities and that didn't go down well with NATO at the Atlantic Council event two weeks ago, former Secretary General of Asmussen was just damning about this, just saying, you know, why? Britain's leaving and you decide to flirt with this kind of project of European defence cooperation when actually you should be thinking about far more substantial issues. Is the EU just in denial about what Brexit means for it by playing around with kind of defence capabilities? Is that actually going to get the European Union anywhere? In terms of security and policing between the UK and the EU, yes, the relationship doesn't necessarily depend upon the European Union in terms of intelligence sharing, in terms of police information, in terms of kind of travel of information, but it does bring up the issue of data and kind of confidentiality and privacy issues, which as you appreciate is a big enough tension in the relationship across the Atlantic. It will certainly be an issue between the UK and the rest of the European Union about whether or not they can trust one another in sharing this information. So the UK can be involved, it can share the information, I think everybody accepts it's realistic to do something, but the general opinion is that in leaving the European Union, it will, in some respects, take up a second tier relationship or a second tier partner within this. It will be important, and I'll come back to this in a moment, but not necessarily the key relationship for the rest of the European Union. In terms of NATO-EU relations, Britain, a lot of people are speculating that Britain is going to put a lot more emphasis now on NATO as the way, as the form through which it wants to discuss pan-European politics, security, and kind of grand, high politics issues. That runs up against not only the EU's own ambitions, but the fact that the EU is still and has emerged as the predominant organization for European economics, politics, and non-traditional security, so things like policing and so forth. It complicates NATO-EU relations, but it doesn't necessarily undermine them. We'll come back to the US in a moment. It raises questions, however, about where Britain sees itself in the world. There's a book that was written recently by Brendan Sims, who's an historian at Cambridge University, called Britain's Europe. And Brendan is no passionate pro-European, but he points out that in British history, Britain's are this real long-running tension between whether it wants to commit to European politics and think about Europe, or whether it wants to think about the wider world. And this is not a new thing. This goes back centuries. And that when Britain turns its back on the European continent, when it forgets about European geopolitics, things end up unpleasant for the United Kingdom in the long run, because it usually has to turn back and try and sort things out. Brendan argues that one product of Britain's arrogance towards the European Union is the United States, that in becoming arrogant about the rest of Europe, Britain kind of turned its back on its European partners. And when given the chance, the Dutch, the French, the Germans, and the Spanish, happily aided American colonialists in rebelling against the crown. And Britain kind of forgot that. The rest of Europe was, it was its number one reference point for international relations. And this applies now. As Brendan points out, if Britain wants to pursue something towards, I don't know, policy towards the South China Sea, developing relations with Vietnam or South Africa and so forth, well, that's all very well and good. But it's a strategic dead end, unless it links back to the main reference point for the United Kingdom, to the number one security concern, which is European security and European politics. That doesn't necessarily mean that Britain has to be in the EU, but everything must, at the end of the day, come back to how this plays into what Britain's position is within a European context and also a transatlantic one. As he would argue, Britain cannot pivot from Europe to the Pacific, like the United States. And to some extent, we've already heard some within the British government already muttering about, well, could we use our commitment to NATO as leverage against certainly Eastern European states for them to negotiate a better deal with us in terms of exiting the European Union. Britain is prepared to kind of almost kind of threaten to leave, not leave NATO, but put NATO on the table, which I think is a stupid thing because the rest of the EU and the United States would call our bluff on that in terms of, well, are you really gonna do this? I don't think you are. Where does this leave the US-UK relationship? For me, the special relationship is special in three areas, nuclear weapons, intelligence sharing, and special forces. In the short to medium term, they are not going to be affected. Obviously, the nuclear weapons issue comes up in terms of Scotland, but intelligence sharing and special forces are not really on the line, although, again, it depends upon how Britain sees itself going forward in terms of its relations in the future. Where does the UK see itself in terms of playing a role? Well, as I said, as Brendan argues, you can't pivot from Europe to the Pacific and so forth. Britain must remain committed to some, playing some role within a European context. And here, it's telling that Britain kind of took a very indifferent role towards the Ukraine crisis. So is Britain going to play a bigger role within Eastern Europe? Britain has committed new troops to Eastern Europe recently, but it remains to be seen whether Britain has the time, the money, the commitment, and so forth to try and do this in the longer run. So what is Britain actually gonna bring to the table? And it certainly comes back to trust. There have been quite a few people coming over to the United States recently, trying to understand how the United States views and runs the relationship with the UK and with Canada, because Europeans, from Brussels and elsewhere, are now trying to work out how they will run a relationship with a country that's offshore, just very nearby, is gonna be one of their closest partners, but is much smaller. People have been looking at the US-Canadian and US-UK relations, and one of the most important things that I think comes down to is a trust thing, that at the end of the day, despite all the arguments between the UK and the US over the years, that core of the special relationship is never endangered. But can the EU and the UK negotiate and find something where they know that when everything is said and done, they remain committed in this one area? And then the issue of Russia and all this. Yes, there was speculation during the referendum campaign that Russia was intervening and getting involved. Could be slightly overblown. Some were certainly of the opinion that Russia had no interest in Brexit and seeing more European instability. Some viewed it as an opportunity for Russia to assert, like the EU's falling apart, the Europeans are internally divided. Why does Ukraine wanna try and join this dysfunctional organization? Aren't we the only proper European power? And it certainly plays into that argument, but we've yet to see where this is gonna go. The one thing which, and I'll end on just this topic, which is how the rest of Europe is viewing Brexit. Again, in Britain, it's understandable, there's a lot of debate about Britain being the issue of Brexit, that it's all about Britain. But from the rest of the EU's perspective, Brexit is only one of the challenges it faces. Now a friend of mine at the Center for European Reform, M. Kordavec, he wrote about how the European Union is surrounded by the four horsemen of the apocalypse. That war is haunting Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Death is going about his business in the Mediterranean in terms of refugees and economic migrants, in terms of drowning in the Mediterranean, so forth. Famine of sorts haunts Southern Europe in terms of Greece and Spain and Italy and the economic hardship that has been unleashed there. And then pestilence comes in the form of your skepticism and fragmentation, which is being spread by Britain. And as he recently joked, there is a fifth horseman on the horizon, depending on your political view, it's either Donald Trump or even Hillary Clinton in terms of being a far more hawkish demanding US president who's not gonna allow the Europeans to free ride anymore. And from the EU's perspective, this is what Brexit means. It's one of the challenges. And going back to what I began on, in terms of the rest of the EU being distracted from Brexit and not really taking it seriously, well, it's understandable. When your currency is in a massive crisis, when the Schengen free movement area is falling apart, when you've got tensions with Ukraine, possible wars in Eastern Europe to obsess about Britain was gonna be a bit too much. But nevertheless, the rest of the European Union is now struggling with Brexit as one of its problems. So within the EU, what's happening? First of all, in losing Britain, the rest of the European Union is going to rebalance itself in terms of the balance of power. So some countries are going to gain from this, some are going to lose. Some political agendas will win from this, some will lose. And you can speculate and map out lots of different possibilities. So you could argue that the EU could become less Atlanticist. You could argue it become more German dominated. You might argue it could become more Eastern and Southern in its views. It could become more protectionist. You can argue against that as well. So what happens within the EU is it negotiates amongst itself as 27 members in different institutions how to distribute the balance of power that's kind of the rebalance of power that was brought about by British exit is one of the issues which the rest of the EU is now struggling with. So Brexit is one issue. Fine, we can negotiate with the UK, but we're negotiating amongst ourselves now how we as a remaining union deal with this. And there's a lot of worry because obviously this connects to the Eurozone and what the future of the Eurozone means. There are those who are pushing for a more far more advanced capability and defense and kind of security matters. And those who are kind of less concerned with that and want to see the European Union maintain a far more strictly intergovernmental weaker union that it kind of currently is in the shape of. But the biggest question that overhangs it is whether it's going to fall apart. Whether Brexit is the final nail in the coffin and whether the European Union unravels. Now for my money, Brexit is not going to do this on its own. You have to really turn to this lady and to this country. We've never faced within the European Union a crisis made in Germany. There's very little literature, very little on how the European Union might disintegrate or lose a member state. There is more literature on how the United States of America might lose a state than there is on the European Union because this was a taboo within the EU. Even the academic community was always committed to the idea of the EU or almost as a forward moving project. So the idea of imagining a country leaving was so unimaginable, you just didn't talk about this. So there was very little literature on this. So as I said, there's more on the United States. Granted, you fought a civil war and so forth and there's a kind of a history to this. But when you think about the two unions and which one's the weaker and which one's the stronger, you'd think there'd be more literature on the European Union. And until recently, there wasn't. But one of the most prominent pieces of literature that we have on this by a man called Douglas Weber, he argues that the key thing is Germany, that we've never faced a crisis made in Germany. Yes, we've had crises in France, in Greece, in Poland, in Britain, but Germany. The paymaster, the heart of the European Union, geographically the center of it, the leading light of it, it's been about Germany. Really, if you think about the European project from the 1940s onwards in terms of harnessing West German power and kind of making sure Germany was embedded within a wider economic system that it wouldn't then kind of break out of, and we've yet to see a crisis made in Germany. Germany's caused crises, you could say, in Greece and elsewhere, in the Eurozone, but Germany itself has never questioned its commitment to European integration. If that were to happen, then all bets are off on the future of the European Union. But even then, you've got four different options. Either the European Union integrates further, so you actually see the emergence of the United States of Europe, or something else. It muddles through, which is what the European Union has done really in the face of the Eurozone crisis, in front of the Schengen crisis, also with regard to Ukraine, and it's coped, but it's not necessarily solved some of the fundamental questions that face it in those areas. It could reconfigure itself, so you don't see the complete collapse of the European Union. You see some members lost, or you see a core Eurozone of Germany, and say the Benelux countries and a few others, kind of shrink, and that's your core European Union. So the EU figures itself, or you see it completely disintegrates. The EU falls apart. That's difficult to imagine, because it's difficult to try and imagine what it goes back to. And that, as Douglas points out, also raises questions about American power. If the European Union disintegrates, then what does that say about the United States' power and influence over Europe, given the United States has traditionally supported European integration? Does it show that the Europeans are worried and are divided about what happens next in terms of, say, declining either US power globally or just US commitment to Europe? Does it show that we're moving into an era that's moving away from liberal internationalism towards more nationalist and more inward-looking politics internationally, not just within Europe, but also around the world? And so what does that say about the United States? What does it say about the transatlantic relationship? What would it mean for NATO to see a European Union disintegrate in front of its eyes? And then finally, very quickly, where does it leave the UK? These are your two contrasting images. One on the left is from the Leave campaign that if you leave the European Union, it can be a global Britain, you can be a Great Britain, you can be a power that can do what it wants in the world, be far more flexible and unshackle yourself from this corpse that is the European Union that's declining, that's inward-looking and so forth, and that they would term little Europe. Whereas the Economist argued, you can have the option of remaining a great power within the European project or you can turn inwards toward little England. And there is a real tension unfolding within Theresa May's government that we've seen for a long time in British politics between her government and some of the messages it points out which are very hyperglobalist, that Britain will be open for business, we will have free trade, we want to do business with the world, we're going to deregulate, we're going to be a Singapore on steroids and so forth, but that runs up against what may have driven the Brexit vote in terms of cultural nationalism, in terms of inward-looking tendencies, not amongst all the voters, of course, but amongst enough to get that voice heard. And it also raises the question, as someone pointed out in Washington a few weeks ago, okay, it looks now unlikely that, I don't want to bet anything, but say that Donald Trump will win the presidency and so forth, but if Brexit tipped the balance within the European Union, within the West and so forth, it was just one of those dominos that pushes the world towards a less internationalist and less outward-looking set of agendas, then how does that run, well, how does that fit with the British government's commitment to negotiating free trade deals and being outward-looking when the rest of the world is turning against it? And on that tension, I will end. Thank you very much.