Ten years ago this week, Britain threw away its geopolitical compass and voted to quit the club of European nations it had been a part of for more than 40 years.
Leaving the European Union was supposed to allow Britain to “take back control” of its destiny. The word that really mattered in that campaign slogan was “back” — the trick was to look backward to reimagine the future. (Not for nothing has Donald Trump’s promise of the past decade been to “Make America Great Again.”)
Brexit, as Britain’s exit from the European Union came to be known, was supposed to be the vessel in which Britain could return to the decades after World War II, when Winston Churchill could pretend, just about, that Britain still counted as a global power.
Boris Johnson, the most prominent face of the campaign to leave and later the prime minister who would negotiate the terms of Brexit, declared that breaking with Brussels would once more open the door to a dynamic, cosmopolitan and global Britain. All Britain had to do was walk through it.
A decade later, the cost of that freedom — of the return, as Mr. Johnson repeatedly put it, of precious national sovereignty — is blindingly apparent. The vote to leave the European Union was a real cry of pain from a large section of the electorate that thought itself left behind by economic progress. The desperation remains. The “sunlit meadows” were a mirage.
For a moment in the summer of 2016, the Brexiteers persuaded a small majority — the vote was 52 percent to 48 percent — that Britain could throw out the austerity that had followed the 2008 global financial crash, reverse the hollowing out of well-paid manufacturing jobs and trade freely and profitably on international markets. Immigrants who had flocked to Britain from Eastern and Central Europe would be sent home. Europe merely held Britain back, and to choose to leave was to believe, as Britons had before, that the nation was meant for more.
There was a reluctance to admit that Britain was becoming a regional rather than global power. As a Conservative foreign secretary in the early 1950s, Anthony Eden had spoken for the political establishment when he said that “Britain’s story and her interests lie far beyond the continent of Europe.” Europe was simply too small an arena for British engagement.
The 21st century’s Brexiteers were every bit as insouciant in their rhetorical disregard of Britain’s relative decline. Nearly four years after the vote to leave, Mr. Johnson, by then prime minister, chose the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, once a hub of the British Empire’s maritime power, to mark the conclusion of negotiations on the terms of Brexit. That 2020 speech, “Unleashing Britain’s Potential,” sought to again conjure an earlier age of swashbuckling adventurism. . . . . Britain was on the threshold of a new golden age.
It was, of course, a fantasy. Mr. Johnson got Brexit through, but as the Conservative pro-European Michael Heseltine has often put it, this is the sovereignty of the man in the desert. The economy has stalled and trade has shrunk. Britain is poorer than it might have been. Its gross domestic product is at least 4 percent — but could be as much as 8 percent — lower, according to independent calculations, while business investment is more than 10 percent lower. It added new frictions to the lives of Britons: new border checks when traveling to E.U. countries, stricter residency rules for living in Europe, fewer opportunities for students to study abroad.
There have been other costs, one of them a weakening of the glue between the nations of the United Kingdom itself. The referendum result was more a statement of English than of British nationalism — majorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain.
Rather than a newly independent Britain cutting a swath on the international stage, economic realities forced cuts in spending on foreign aid and diplomacy. The hopes among Brexiteers for a new Anglosphere, adding the English-speaking Commonwealth nations of Canada, Australia and New Zealand to Britain’s “special relationship” with the United States, turned to dust, and Britain’s privileged place in Washington was lost to Mr. Trump’s disdain for traditional alliances.
John Major, who as a Conservative prime minister in the 1990s fought off his party’s anti-Europeans, has been blunt in his conclusion. Brexit has left Britain poorer, weaker and locked out of the richest free trade market in history. “The U.K. once reveled in being a leading member of an E.U. with half a billion citizens and the undoubted first ally of the United States — the world’s most eminent superpower,” Mr. Major said in a speech last year. “Today, we know we are neither — and so does the world.”
When President Vladimir Putin of Russia launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it was a salutary reminder of the lesson of several centuries of European history. An island Britain may be, but it cannot escape the facts of its geography. Its security is inextricably bound to that of its neighbors.
Since becoming prime minister in 2024, Mr. Starmer has scrambled to rebuild bridges with Britain’s erstwhile European Union partners. He has made some progress. . . . Together with European partners, Mr. Starmer has also acted as a brake on the White House’s attempts to insist on a peace deal that would, in effect, hand Mr. Putin victory.
On the economic front, the prime minister is negotiating with Brussels to strip away some of the more nonsensical obstacles thrown up by Brexit to free trade, student exchanges and energy cooperation. He is also seeking to participate in the E.U.’s burgeoning program for collective defense procurement.
There is an irony here. Many in the Brexit camp saw Britain’s close relationship with the United States as an alternative to its European connections. But Mr. Trump has turned away from all of his trans-Atlantic partners, Britain included.
In any case, there is no certainty of an easy route back in. Opinion polls point to a majority of Britons believing Brexit was a mistake but do not yet point to a public clamor to overturn the result. Leaving the European Union took four years of intense, often acrimonious, negotiation. Rejoining could well take longer — particularly since, after the unwanted upheaval of Brexit, Britain’s former partners would have their own conditions for resuming the relationship.
The Brexiteers found an opportunity in 2016 in significant part because of the failure of successive governments to address the fundamental economic and social issues that lay at the heart of popular discontent or to tell the hard truths about the inevitable, and difficult, political trade-offs that would be necessary to restore a vibrant economy and begin the rebuilding of decaying public services.
Those who said leaving the European Union was the answer were peddling a nostalgic delusion, but for those who considered themselves left behind, it was an attractive one. A reversal would force the profound psychological shift that Britain has tried so resolutely to avoid since the dissolution of its empire: that Britain can still count itself a great nation, but it is no longer a great power.
History’s dismal verdict on Brexit has been written: Untrammeled sovereignty can end up looking like lonely isolation.
A few months after the Brexit referendum, when the United States selected Mr. Trump as its president and read the rites over Pax Americana, America chose exceptionalism, too.
As different as the circumstances and characters on either side of the Atlantic were, there was a shared story in these epochal statements of national independence. Both were populist revolts against ruling elites. Stop the world, voters declared, we want to get off.
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