Brexit: Coming Apart at the Seams?

In the immediate wake of Auschwitz, the French novelist Francois Mauriac wrote: “We who live beneath a sky still streaked with the smoke of crematoriums have paid a high price to find out that evil is really evil.” Then came the Cold War and, a generation later with the onset of the twenty-first century, the 9/11 attacks and specter of a new age of terrorism with a Middle Eastern and Islamist flashpoint but the potential to ignite a new global conflagration.

Growing out of World War II and the Holocaust: the United Nations and the establishment of Israel, and the NATO Alliance and the European Union, were all supposed to create new international realities that would help the world transcend past evils and emerge from their shadows into a redeemed future.

The United Kingdom’s decision yesterday to leave the  EU was no doubt motivated by many good intentions including the desire to restore national sovereignty, fettered today by an officious Brussels bureaucracy, and thereby “Make Great Britain Great Again.” This is the vision sold by Brit populist-conservative and former London mayor Boris Johnson, a sort of Donald Trump with brains. Unfortunately, the road to hell has always been paved with good intentions.

With Brexit, we now may face the prospect, not of an extinction level event, but of a global Richter Scale eruption probably on the magnitude of 7.00 that could be a premonitory shock to even greater upheavals unraveling the post-1945 world order. Europe is ground zero for what’s happening, but the economic and political reverberations for the U.S., for Israel and the Middle East, and for East and South Asia all will be profound and disturbing.

Together with Russia’s Vlad Putin and France’s Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump is our Loki—one among many aspiring “lords of misrule”—who is trumpeting his delight at the triumph of the centrifugal forces that, rather than Make the UK Great Again, are more likely to Make the UK Disintegrate Again with a new push for Scottish independence and then a possible secession of Wales and even Northern Ireland. The spillover consequences could not only eventually doom the EU but cause the disintegration rather than the revitalization of nation states like France and Spain bedeviled by their own internal contradictions or separatist movements. Germany, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe may become fragments of the new shattered European mosaic transformed by refugee and migrant inflows from beyond Europe.

In parallel fashion, the tenuous nation state system imposed on the Middle East after World War I by Sykes-Picot is also in a state of advanced collapse, while China and India tussle with Japan as they all try to forge their own visions of greatness in a different region which has as a wild card North Korea’s psychotic nuclear-armed regime. Africa and Latin America are partly bystanders, partly participants, in relation to the increasingly unsettled international system.

Then there is the U.S. where one of the two great national parties has just been taken over by a populist-isolationist who, under the banner of a reborn “America First,” wants to bring back the U.S.’ pre-Auschwitz response that was supposed to hermetically seal off innocent Americans from involvement in World War II but instead sucked the U.S. into that war’s maelstrom.

At his renovated Turnberry Golf Course in Southwestern Scotland—where Trump was preceded by a bag piper and heckled by protests featuring a Mexican flag—Trump of course took credit for Brexit’s “yuge” victory (52 to 48 percent). “I felt it was going to happen. There are great similarities between what happened here and my campaign. People want to take their country back.” He also suggested that he would be for the breakup of the entire EU. He described immigration in Germany and Europe as a “real problem” and said he has friends in Germany who are thinking about moving “because of the tremendous influx of people.” If the British pound craters—as it already has—thhat’s OK with Trump because it will be cheaper for American tourists to come visit his Scottish golf course.

For Israelis and Jews globally, the shadow of the Holocaust survives, transmogrified by the threat of new twenty-first century terrors. Donald Trump may seem like just a comic buffoon, but he is part and parcel of our destabilizing twenty-first century landscape.

Fasten your seat belts for the vertiginous roller coaster ride ahead.