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by pavlov
3437 days ago
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Powerful nations want bilateral agreements, because it's the strong negotiating with the weak. And this is why "hard Brexit" is such a risky endeavor for the UK. The EU is much larger and more experienced in trade deals. From day one Britain will be negotiating from a position of weakness. Once negotiations begin, Britain has a hard 2-year deadline... And to make it worse, they don't have people with experience in bilateral trade agreements because the EU has been in charge of those for 40 years. The British press is trying to spin this inherently weak position into a matter of EU countries looking to punish Britain, or other such nonsense. |
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Power, soft and hard, depends in large part on pure economic capacity; that enables many things, including economic leverage, larger militaries, and high tech. I don't have the old numbers, but look at this list and imagine their relative power as individual nations before the rise of China and India:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28no...
But China and India likely will take two of the top three spots, along with the U.S., leaving those individual European powers far behind - $5 trillion economies in a world of $25 trillion superpowers (making a guess at future growth). They will be small fish among the sharks, no longer with a place at the table or influence on global affairs. A unified EU would be a fourth power, but that takes time, especially the political unification necessary to conduct foreign affairs (where the EU government has unified control of foreign policy - otherwise their words aren't backed up by the actual power). They are moving the wrong way.