Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/01/27/brexit-chicken-and-ulysses-pa.html
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Back in the real world, trade deals are stubbornly difficult and time-consuming to negotiate.
Which is why you need an experienced and able State Department — if you’re the US — to do the grunt work of negotiating your trade deals after the President has shaken hands with the foreign premier.
May may be in the unenviable position of having to secure a favourable deal with the Orange One to ease the pain of triggering Article 50, but it’ll be easier if her diplomats know what they’re doing and the American ones don’t.
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Really shows the desperation of the current U.K. Government when Trump is it’s economic sheet anchor.
Let’s see how long one can spin the “Woe me, victim of the evil EU Empire”-narrative
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UK can choose it’s cards, takes a pair of twos. Seriously, what leverage does the UK have here?
“I’m leaving!”
“OK, see you!”
"…but…"
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not to forget the UK/Turkey relationship as cornerstone of a New British Century. it must be …unsavoury… to find best pals only in generally unloved areas of the political landscape
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Are you implying that a mandatory cursory skimming of The Art of the Deal won’t bring whatever C-list hacks get called in as replacements for our senior diplomats to full readiness to go out and win at trade?
You filthy heretic.
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Erdogan is really making it awkward these days; but hasn’t Turkey been the True Freedom Buddy we are a trifle nervous about for both the US and UK for some time now?
They’ve got that sweet airbase location that makes Russia nervous and covers much of the middle east without in-air refueling; and their official policy is that they don’t hate our guts, which puts them above the regional average; but depending on comparatively regular military coups to preserve democracy has its downsides; and they utterly don’t get along with the Kurds, who have the great virtue of both being quite competent and still being surprisingly friendly despite decades of not getting much of what they want in exchange for a lot of ugly proxy warring.
(For that matter, the EU also has a bit of a Turkey problem; given that Turkish cooperation is their main option for sidestepping refugees they don’t want to deal with while remaining nominally compliant with human rights obligations; and Turkey knows that.)
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oh, I never tried to imply that the EU has a better standing in this regard - and it got much more complicated last week: The Greek supreme court decided that the Turkish soldiers who fled to Greece after the failed coup attempt have legal grounds for an asylum as they will not get a fair trial in Turkey.
I hope the ideal of human rights persists, but I fear they will extradited anyway, in a way both the future of the EU and Merkel are based on the ugly refugee deal with Turkey.
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I wonder if Game Theory, already misused by cold war military strategists,neoliberal economic strategists, and digital era technological strategists, will now be your ugly poster child of choice for the troubles of the developing Brexitrump period.
John von Neumann would probably calculate probabilities for win-win solutions during Brexit on a napkin. And then blow his nose.
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Given their childish faith in ‘rational actors’; I imagine that the game theorists have probably run screaming from contemporary politics and are are rocking back and forth, attempting to sooth themselves by repeating excerpts from On Thermonuclear War over and over.
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Filthy, foreign infidel, if you don’t mind. 
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As you wish, Xenos.
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Then don’t tell them that a TV show host is in the oval office. They’ll probably look at all the letters a certain Marilyn got in response to a certain problem solution, shake their heads savantly and declare “its all for the goats, eh?” Afterwards, they would probably end up in a bar, in denial, and look appalled whenever someone mentions the word goat.
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