J. Tattersall wrote:Repulse wrote:I think there is a subtle but substantial difference. During the UK’s membership of the EU, everyone was focused on a global strategy with other Europeans top at mind. Regardless of your view on Brexit, the UK focus is now more broad and therefore can and needs to build strategic relationships with other nations.
During the EU days one of the big problems with its CFSP was the shear struggle to move the organisation away from being predominately inward looking. That's one of the big negatives of the EU, to be fair it does have positives too. For the EU the threat must be that other players (European & otherwise) will better appreciate the enormity of recent events and not delay acting. I expect the likes of France, Canada, Australia, Britain etc..will act to form new alliances and strengthen existing one's, including with each other. Germany will probably demand a predominantly EU based multilateral approach and be in danger of being potentially left behind when, as I fear, the EU fails to deliver and instead focuses it's energies on Eurocratic policy initiatives such as Strategic Compass and European Defence Fund.
The thing with CFSP and other mechanisms to try and create a joint foreign policy though is that the UK put in great effort to Keep them as shallow and cumbersome as it could and acted as the cornerstone of US backed efforts to ensure it remained as ineffective and irrelevant as possible.
Post-Brexit for one there isn't the same kind of important, central and powerful memberstate for others to rally around and/or be incentivised by to join a blocking coalition and simultaneously the attractiveness and reliability of US patronage and privileged treatment is continuing to decline.
Just ask the Poles, they went in super hard against Germany on Nordstream and wasted a lot of energy and good will just to get unceremoniously dumped when the US decided it was better to accept the German fait accompli and do a face saving deal among the big boys, leaving Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine humiliated.
At least when the Germans deal with Russia they take their Project™ into account and generally looped in.
You have to ask yourself, if the US decides that China is so important that Russia needs to be rehabilitated and does a deal to that regard where will that leave those EE countries that profess such fear of Russia?