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Rewind and Reconnoiter: Post-Brexit British Power on the Global Stage

April 9, 2025
Rewind and Reconnoiter: Post-Brexit British Power on the Global Stage
Rewind and Reconnoiter: Post-Brexit British Power on the Global Stage

Rewind and Reconnoiter: Post-Brexit British Power on the Global Stage

James Rogers and Philip Shetler-Jones
April 9, 2025
In their 2016 article, “After Brexit, a Bold Britain: A Game Plan for Remaking British Power,” Philip Shetler-Jones and James Rogers laid out a blueprint for how the United Kingdom could use the then-hypothetical Brexit as an opportunity to remake British Power on the global stage. Nine years on, as Brexit and several other watershed moments on the global stage have come to pass, we asked them to reassess their recommendations.Image: Public DomainIn your 2016 article, “After Brexit, a Bold Britain: A Game Plan for Remaking British Power,” you outlined a vision for remaking British power post-Brexit. Now that the United Kingdom has entirely left the European Union and experienced years of implementation challenges, how would you assess the gap between your recommended strategic approach and the actual path Britain has taken?The hope that the United Kingdom would show a willingness to balance competing interests and approach new challenges and opportunities in a tradition of dogged optimism held true for a while, post-Brexit. The union between England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales remains firm, and successive governments since 2019, including the new Labour government, have made it clear that the United Kingdom has left the European Union for good. Though COVID-19 caused major disruptions and raised alarms about economic collapse, those fears ultimately proved overblown.Out of the four scenarios presented in our article, the outcome has fallen somewhere between our “Engaged Island” and “Bold Britain” futures, although closer to the latter. While there was no Royal Commission “to report on how such a strategy could be realized to ensure the security, sovereignty, and prosperity of the United Kingdom through and beyond Brexit,” the “integrated reviews” of 2021 and 2023 did a good job on foreign policy orientation. Since 2021, as we recommended, His Majesty’s Government has worked “towards forging ever closer relations between the

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In their 2016 article, “After Brexit, a Bold Britain: A Game Plan for Remaking British Power,” Philip Shetler-Jones and James Rogers laid out a blueprint for how the United Kingdom could use the then-hypothetical Brexit as an opportunity to remake British Power on the global stage. Nine years on, as Brexit and several other watershed moments on the global stage have come to pass, we asked them to reassess their recommendations.Image: Public DomainIn your 2016 article, “After Brexit, a Bold Britain: A Game Plan for Remaking British Power,” you outlined a vision for remaking British power post-Brexit. Now that the United

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