Secr. Kerry Remarks On Brexit

Most recent comment after a few days of intensive meetings, talks and reflection:

○ John Kerry: Brexit could be ‘walked back’ | The Guardian |

    Claiming there were a number of ways in which Thursday’s vote could be “walked back”, John Kerry, who visited Downing Street on Monday, said David Cameron was loth to invoke article 50, the EU exit procedure. He said the British prime minister felt powerless to “start negotiating a thing that he doesn’t believe in” and “has no idea how he would do it”.

○ UK rudderless, as Conservatives and Labour look for post-Brexit leaders

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London politics looks quite similar to the last days of Rome and the decline of its Empire

As there are no kids involved, my prediction the Brexit divorce will be messy as it will be about markets, trade and sellf-interest.

Remarks With Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni Before Their Meeting

SECRETARY KERRY: Well, buongiorno. Good morning to everybody. I’m delighted to be here with Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni, and we have a lot to talk about today besides Brexit, though I will address Brexit in a moment. But we need to talk about Libya, where we are working extremely closely together; Syria; and our preparations for the NATO Warsaw summit. So there’s a great deal on the table, including our counterterrorism efforts and the meeting that will take place in Washington on the 21st of July, which will be a major gathering of all of the coalition with respect to ISIL.

And the reason I start off by mentioning all of that is really to emphasize that the vote about Brexit and the changes that now are being thought through have to be thought through in the context of the interests and the values that bind us together with the EU. Twenty-two of the nations in the EU are members of NATO, and so there is a continuing criticality to this relationship. And one of the things that I want to emphasize in coming here today to Europe is how important the relationship of Europe – the EU – is to the United States and to the world.

One country has made a decision. Obviously, it is a decision that the United States had hoped would go the other way. But it didn’t. And so we begin with a fundamental respect for voters. In a democracy, when the voters speak, it is the job of leaders to listen and then to make sure that they are moving in a way that is responsible to address the concerns. I am absolutely convinced – and I say this to the marketplace, I say this to citizens who are wondering what is going on – I am absolutely convinced, President Obama is absolutely convinced that we will be able to work through this in a sensible, thoughtful way that takes the best strengths of the EU, the best strengths of the marketplace, the best interests of our national security and international security, and works to keep them moving in the right direction for our countries. I have no doubt about our ability to be able to do that. And so we will continue, the United States, to have a very close and special relationship with Great Britain. We value that relationship. That does not change because of this vote.

On the other hand, obviously there are steps that Europe needs to take to respond to the expression of voters and to the concerns of people in other countries. But there is no doubt in my mind the marketplace of the EU without Great Britain is 450 million people. This is a very powerful economic entity. It is also an entity that shares values and interests with the United States and the rest of the world, and we have always believed in the United States that an EU united and strong is our preference for a partner to be able to work on the important issues that face us today.

So I am looking forward to my meetings tomorrow, when I will meet in both Brussels and London – Brussels with the EU and, of course, in London in order to determine what they’re thinking about the transition and the process ahead. The most important thing is that all of us as leaders work together to provide as much continuity, as much stability, as much certainty as possible in order for the marketplace to understand that there are ways to minimize disruption, there are ways to smartly move ahead in order to protect the values and interests that we share in common.  

John Kerry talking about Brexit, Globalization and disruptors in digital society | Aspen Institute |

Now, unless you all spent the entire week hiking and sleeping without your cell phone – which is very enticing, believe me – (laughter) – you have undoubtedly been reading, thinking, and talking about Brexit, and maybe in the Q&A we’ll talk about it in a little bit. I mentioned I talked to the leaders from the UK, EU – I left out NATO. I met also with Jens Stoltenberg. And my message to all of them was very simple – that America’s commitment to the EU and to Great Britain is as strong as ever to both the transatlantic partnership and to our special relationship. And the Brexit vote in my judgment, and I think President Obama’s judgment, does not affect the agenda that we share with NATO, the G7, the P5, all – and by the way, the NATO leaders, we will all be meeting in about a week in Warsaw for the NATO summit, and it actually makes that summit more important and it makes much of what we will be doing to reassure the front-line states and to make it clear how important that alliance still remains. So we will continue to collaborate with both the British and the EU.

And I want to just emphasize, as I did in England yesterday, the values that we have shared for so long with our friends, the Brits, and that we shared in the vision of an EU, and the interests and its interests and values that make up foreign policy and its interests and values that brought us together – they are the same today as they were before the vote last Wednesday. Didn’t change a thing. So remember that as we go forward, and I reminded both parties how critical it is to remain steady here. And the steadiness of our purpose, I think, is evident and embraced by all, and the ability to rely on capable partners right now in this world that we’re living in is more critical than ever, because it is increasingly clear that pundits and practitioners alike understand more and more of how we are living in a much more complex world than at any time in our history.

For years, if you go back to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the great changes that came about thereafter – Tito, Yugoslavia – I mean, societies were compressed by the Cold War, by the entire post-World War II order. And a lot of societies were shielded by the absence of communication, by the slow pace of doing business if they did business at all effectively, and by the simplicity of the bipolar East-West divide which defined the world for the latter part and even for most of since 1917 – for most of the 20th century.

Now, as every single one of you knows and as you talk about in every which way as we contemplate various disruptors in our lives and in society, we are dealing with a world which speeds up politics, speeds up the flow of information beyond the capacity of most people to digest it. And believe me, that was underscored by the fact that I noticed that the largest internet Google search in England the day after the vote was “What is the EU?” (Laughter.) I’m serious.

So this is a world where globalization and instantaneous communication are connecting people in more ways than ever before. The kids in Tahrir Square – that wasn’t motivated by any religious extremism, nor were the kids who originally came out in Syria to demonstrate for a future. The fact is that we see more people connected in more ways than ever before, and so everybody knows what everybody else has, and that underscores what you don’t have.  

Hmmm … what has changed in a month’s time, eternity in the digital age!  😉

○ NATO to hold talks with Russia before alliance summit | France24 – May 20, 2016 |
○ Russia agrees to talks with NATO after Warsaw summit: France | Reuters – June 29, 2016 |

EU army? New security strategy says bloc should `go beyond NATO’

“Our Union is under threat. Our European project, which has brought unprecedented peace, prosperity and democracy, is being questioned,” it reads.

“A more credible European defense is essential also for the sake of a healthy transatlantic partnership with the United States,” the document also states. The US now subsidizes European defense by vastly outspending all other NATO members and paying about 75 percent of the bloc’s spending.

In the meantime, the paper also actively encourages European countries to increase their defense spending and create strong defense industry that would become a basis of the union’s future military autonomy.

“Investment in security and defense is a matter of urgency,” it states, stressing that “defense cooperation must become the norm.”

EU should “systematically encourage defense cooperation and strive to create a solid European defense industry, which is critical for Europe’s autonomy of decision and action,” the paper adds, stressing that member states must channel “a sufficient level of expenditure to defense, make the most efficient use of resources, and meet the collective commitment of 20 percent of defense budget spending devoted to the procurement of equipment and research & technology,” if they want to be able to cope with external threats.

Watch and listen to the leaders of Poland and the Baltic states … they’re furieus! Observe who gets invited on the mass media talk shows [cq propaganda]. Even registered the return of our former nemesis, former British citizen and former FM of Poland.
Remember Russiaphobes’ favorite son Radek Sikorski?

His secretly taped conversation with expletives towards David Cameron proved to be right. 😉

Polish MPs ridicule Cameron’s ‘stupid propaganda’ aimed at Eurosceptics | The Guardian – June 2014 |

The Polish foreign minister believes David Cameron has “fucked up” his handling of the EU by resorting to “stupid propaganda” to appease Eurosceptics, according to an expletive-laden transcript of secretly taped conversations.

Radoslaw Sikorski, who is close to many senior Tories and as an Oxford University student was a member of the Bullingdon Club at the same time as Boris Johnson, made the comments in a conversation with the former Polish finance minister Jacek Rostowski.

The conversation between the two men, printed in Monday’s edition of Wprost news magazine, reveals the extent of the fallout between Poland and the UK over Cameron’s proposals to change EU migrants’ access to benefits.

Downing Street responded to the leaked Polish tapes by saying that the prime minister would continue to stand up for British interests and deal with the “abuse” of free movement because support for the EU in Britain is “wafer thin”.

In another secretly taped conversation, the spokesman for the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, claims Tusk “fucked him [Cameron] up good” during a conversation with the British prime minister over plans to curb access to benefits in the UK.