Six weeks before the Brexit referendum, I shared a platform with David Cameron, then prime minister, and argued that Brexit was a massive geopolitical mistake. I said the case for Britain to remain in the EU was “about power and influence, and the interests and values they project, in a world that is changing fast”. The speeches were overshadowed, to put it mildly, by an overnight briefing from Downing Street that a vote to leave was a “vote for World War III”. That claim was counterproductive because it was absurd – but the core argument about the consequences of separating Britain from continental politics is even more true today than it was ten years ago.
Brexit weakened Britain, Europe and the West at just the wrong time. It weakened Britain because we lost an economic and political force multiplier. It weakened Europe because the UK had been a positive economic and political presence in the EU. And it weakened the West because it created division within Europe just as the first Trump administration was reorienting American policy. It would be wrong to trace a direct line from the Brexit vote to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But it would be right to say that the invasion of Ukraine has exposed the central folly of Brexit’s logic – above all, the assumption that it was possible, even necessary, for Britain to be national or global in its outlook, but not regional.
Today, EU unity, strength and finance in support of Ukraine is central to Britain’s number-one foreign policy priority – yet our contribution to, and influence over, shared European effort comes from outside the room where the decisions are made.
This matters because we face global geopolitics marked by a modern version of the “Kindleberger trap”: a power vacuum in which critical global public goods – open markets, territorial integrity and climate security – are up for grabs. From the invasion of Ukraine to the American war in Iran, from China’s assault on the world’s trading system to the neglect of the global commons (such as pandemic preparedness), the scramble for insulation from international disorder is accelerating.
Mark Carney, speaking in Davos in January, called this a moment of “rupture” and he was right. But we should also follow his maxim of waking up every morning and thinking, “What can I do?” rather than, “What has President Trump tweeted?” For Britain, outside the EU but indispensable to European security, the answer has to begin by acknowledging how the world has changed in the past decade.
Today’s world is “multi-aligned”, with fluid and transactional coalitions working together on different issues. This is, I think, a better description than the idea of “multipolarity”, which implies too great a degree of stability. There are many players in this new global situation, often with asymmetric power, as Iran has shown at the Strait of Hormuz. The idea of a balanced, multipolar order seems fanciful to me. This does not exist in today’s world. Instead, we have a multi-aligned search for buoys in a choppy sea.
Global hyper-connectedness means new risks have emerged, and so the need for cooperation across borders is greater than ever. Cooperative efforts represent countervailing power against the marauding forces of disorder – not just the 60 or so wars going on at the moment, but power plays on every continent.
In such a global context, Europe faces internal as well as external demons. The defeat of Viktor Orbán by the Hungarian opposition removes one obstacle to EU decision-making in the short term, but the appeal of nationalism, and resentment over internationalism, remains potent.
Europe’s biggest security priority is containing Russia at a time when Washington’s National Security Strategy is focused on renewing economic relations. A central question, therefore, is how to accommodate Ukraine within EU structures – which British governments of both parties have, ironically, supported. That requires institutional flexibility of a kind that the EU views with wariness: it might mean tiers of membership, or “associate membership”. We in the UK need to take off our blinkers, clarify our own interests and engage urgently with the debates taking place in European capitals.
I have no doubt Britain’s security and prosperity depend on a much stronger institutional relationship with the EU. But a reversal of Brexit is literally impossible – not only because the deal we had before 2016 is no longer on the table, but also because the EU itself is changing. The question is not whether to turn back the clock, but what future relationship we can build.
It is vital we combine the strengths of the EU’s member states, the UK and other European countries outside it (such as Norway). We cannot contain Russia without the EU. We cannot renew our economy by pretending the EU does not exist. We cannot secure our energy future without EU engagement. All of this requires imagination on a structured institutional relationship that goes well beyond anything on offer right now. We need to recognise this is a new debate – not a replay of an old one.
David Miliband is president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee and a member of the Centre for European Reform’s advisory board. He was UK foreign secretary from 2007 to 2010
[Further reading: We cannot afford another failed government]
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This article appears in the 01 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Happy Birthday America
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Subscribe here to commentA useful analysis of the problems but short of solutions. Rejoining the EU as one of two net contributors (remember the £350 million on Boris’s bus) is only a start. Russia will not invade a NATO member state at any time in the future. That doesn’t mean he will not be sending his FSB thugs to murder strategic people in the West, will not be increasing his use of cyber attacks, cutting our undersea cables, etc. Our best defence is to defeat him in the Ukraine so totally that he is aware of the resources available to the West if, eventually, we begin to use those resources. Currently we are as inept at imposing sanctions, arresting ships filled with Russian oil, and supplying hardware to Ukraine as a third world country. I agree with Simon Jenkins in today’s Guardian that we badly need to get our act together and start engaging with Russia from a position of strength.