Protecting Britain from the Coming Storm

Joining a four-tier Europe would protect Britain from the coming storm
It's not just the survival of the union that is at stake, but the survival of democracy
The New European
By Paul Mason

… Let’s state the strategic challenge clearly. Deglobalisation is under way. It is speeding up, it is irreversible and it coincides with an explicit challenge to the rules-based order, not just by Russia but by China and the BRICS+ alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). Those within Europe who saw “strategic autonomy” as a nice-to-have option, loosening the EU’s ties to the US while avoiding any defence or geo-strategic assertiveness, have been disabused.

As Christine Lagarde, head of the European Central Bank, put it in April, the forces of disintegration are so strong that we may even see the world divided into just two blocs, two currency areas and two broad value systems…The EU’s most pressing challenge is not, in this context, formal enlargement, but how to avoid being ripped apart by a Russian hybrid warfare offensive that uses domestic right wing populism and social media manipulation to send more of its member states down the path of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary (with Slovakia most imminently at risk).

… The unanswered question remains: will American democracy survive? I’m finding, even among educated business types on six-figure salaries, a distinct unwillingness to confront the possibility that it won’t…The question that really haunts the Group of 12 report is this: what if Trump wins the 2024 US election, either from jail or from bail, pardons himself and the January 6 insurrectionaries, and unleashes constitutional disorder on America?

That would be a slam dunk for the combined forces of Vladimir Putin and Rupert Murdoch (now retired but still a backseat driver). Even something close to that – a right wing Republican presidency that walks away both from Nato and the Ramstein Group supporting Ukraine, would demand an immediate “regime change of the mind” in European capitals.

More here

https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/joining-a-four-tier-europe-would-protect-britain-from-the-coming-storm/