Former U.S. Ambassador To UN: Britain Should Leave The EU And America Must Support It

Britain should quit the European Union (EU) or else it will find its global influence diminished and the future of Nato under threat, a former American ambassador to the United Nations has warned.

Writing in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, John Bolton says that it is also in America’s best interests for the UK to leave as the EU could become a threat to its global influence.

Ambassador Bolton says that far from helping U.S. security, a strong EU actually poses a threat to NATO and the present world order:

From our perspective, the biggest potential risk of “ever closer union,” the EU’s stated goal, is that, if “remain” prevails, many Europeans will accelerate their efforts to fully implement a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). Although innocuous sounding, CFSP’s clear objective is an EU international policy separate and apart from America.

If Britain stays within this, he adds, it would “dramatically constrain Britain’s political discretion and thereby impair NATO.”

This would in turn leave non-EU NATO members, especially the U.S., “excluded from critical decision-making, and confronted with EU policies contrary to what they preferred.”

“The emergence of a truly common EU foreign policy, therefore, could well mean the end of NATO,” he adds.

Staying in the EU would also be bad for Britain as it would face “increased submission to a German-French EU which, in turn, inevitably means further distancing from America.”

Indeed, it could lead to America to respond in kind:

Pro-EU Britons and continental Europeans risk getting what they ask for. If the EU acts separately from NATO, ready and able to shoulder the burdens of implementing its own policy, many Americans will ask why we should have any military role in Europe. EU members are already properly criticized for not spending adequately for the North Atlantic area’s common defense; for their unwillingness to fully engage in out-of-area NATO deployments, such as Afghanistan; and for weakness and fecklessness in combating international terrorism and nuclear proliferation. An EU-centric Britain will be increasingly powerless to resist. Americans, finally at the end of their patience, could be content to see NATO disappear.

If Britain does vote to leave next week, however, the EU’s remaining members will have “too much to lose to retaliate against Britain for rejecting the EU.”

“It is in America’s interest that Brexit succeed,” he concludes, “as a clear signal to the supporters of global governance that their seemingly inexorable progress has come to a dramatic stop.”