The British people have spoken. They have clearly said, “We want to leave the European Union.” But beyond that, their accent is so thick that we only have the faintest idea why they did it or what they intend to do next.

What we know is that, like turkeys voting for Christmas, the British have opted to weaken their economy, reduce their international standing, and create massive uncertainty at a time when the world really doesn’t need it. All in the name of the abstract concepts of “independence” and “sovereignty.”

Why did this happen? In the face of strong arguments from most mainstream politicians and experts of all kinds that leaving the EU would be disastrous for the country, why did so many Britons still choose to do it?

It has to do with a growing divide between the governing and the governed

As Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), emphasized in his victory speech, the heart of this story seems to be the British people telling the elite to stick it. 

It is, after all, rather extraordinary that more than half the voting population defied a large majority of its own elected parliament, all of the traditional political parties, and virtually every important institution in the country — from the Central Bank to the leaders of industry to the trade unions.

These leaders and institutions made very solid arguments about the economic and security benefits Britain enjoys as a member of the EU.

The UK Treasury, for example, used state-of-the-art modeling to demonstrate that Brexit would cause a recession and cost British household about $6,200 a year.

George Soros, a currency trader who made billions predicting the path of the British pound, said Brexit would cause a financial crisis.

President Obama warned that Britain would become weaker and less respected, in part because as the president of the United States, he would respect them less. He promised to “send them to the back of the queue” for any new trade deal.

That these arguments failed to convince 52 percent of the voters demonstrates that there is an enormous gap between the governing and the governed. 

The elite political class’s intellectual arguments failed to resonate with large segments of British society because they misread the country. They apparently believed that the same arguments that appealed to the younger, wealthier urban classes in London and Scotland would be sufficient to convince the rest of Britain of the value of the EU.

In retrospect, they failed to fully appreciate the anger and frustrations of a huge swath of Britain: the old, the lower middle class, and the English outside of London who feel left behind by globalization, oppressed by immigration, and ignored by (and distrustful of) the elites.

For those people, the views and opinions of Treasury officials, prime ministers, and foreign leaders weren’t just unconvincing — they were part of the problem.

But that constituency just made its anger and frustrations abundantly clear at the ballot box.

This is part of a broader populist trend that’s happening all across Europe

For all the talk of its uniqueness and physical separation from Europe, the UK is not an outlier when it comes to experiencing this elite-popular divide. Many, if not most, of the countries across Europe are currently facing a similar gap between the population and the governing class.

For a long time, European leaders have blamed their failures on the EU rather than acknowledging their own incapacity to deal with difficult challenges like unemployment and immigration. As a result, pro-European referendums have been failing across Europe — in France, in the Netherlands, and in Ireland — for many years.

The outcome of the Brexit referendum, then, should be seen not as an anomaly but rather as part of a larger trend of popular backlash against elites that is taking place across Europe.

Populist politicians in France and the Netherlands have already called for their own versions of an exit referendum. A forthcoming study from my think tank, the European Council on Foreign Relations, shows a virtual tsunami of 33 proposed EU referendums in 18 different European member states.

If even a fraction of these referendums come to pass, the EU will be consumed with them and probably torn apart by the results. Fights over Frexit, Nexit, and beyond will be more than the current system can take.

Indeed, this anti-elite trend has even reached the United States: Donald Trump’s populist rhetoric taps into a similar dynamic of discontent with the governing class. Indeed, Trump greeted the news of the “Leave” victory by congratulating the voters on “taking their country back,” portraying the Brexit vote as an example of how the people can take back power from corrupt and self-serving elites.

Bridging this gap between governed and governing confronts a fundamental dilemma. It is hard to convince people that you will address their concerns if they don’t believe anything you say — even when you have impressive charts and data to back up your claims.

Elites across Europe and North America will need to move beyond evidence and demonstrate real empathy with the problems of their constituents if they are to remain in power.

They will have to find a way to validate the concerns of their constituents on issues such as immigration and economic insecurity without gutting their own principles. Otherwise, we will see more anti-establishment referendums and stronger populist parties, and eventually the demagogues will take over.

At that point, the elites will really know what it’s like to be governed by people who don’t care about your concerns.

The battle to retake the Iraqi city of Fallujah has begun: 20,000 Iraqi soldiers, backed by US air power and advisers, are attempting to expel some 800 to 1,000 ISIS fighters.

This is now the third time since 2003 that US and Iraqi forces have fought to retake Fallujah (building on an even longer British tradition of retaking Fallujah.)

But the question is not whether the US and its allies will win in Fallujah — they always do. The real question is whether it will finally matter. As the latest battle for Fallujah commences, the taking and retaking of the city has become a symbol of the utter pointlessness of US efforts in Iraq.

Fallujah is costly to retake, but the US is always successful

The strategic value of Fallujah is clear. It’s only about 40 miles outside of Baghdad along the Euphrates River and controls the main highway to Jordan and Syria. The presence of ISIS there is a constant threat to Baghdad and a thorn in the side of the Iraqi government. ISIS must be rooted out of Fallujah before the Iraqi military can turn its attention to the bigger prize of Mosul, Iraq’s second city, in the north.

Yet the price of the battles of Fallujah has been very high for all involved. The second battle of Fallujah in 2004 was the bloodiest of the 2003 to 2011 Iraq War. The US lost nearly 100 soldiers there in retaking the city in 2004. The insurgents lost as many as 1,500.

The city has been reduced to rubble several times, and virtually all of the city’s occupants— about 350,000 people — have been forced to flee their homes over and over again. Many more people will die in the next battle, as ISIS defends the city fiercely and leaves behind a sea of booby traps.

Still, the US and its allies have won all of their previous battles for Fallujah. And although the US will only be playing a supporting role this time around, it should be successful as well. The US military is an incredibly effective learning organization and every time it retakes the city of Fallujah, it gets better at it.

But retaking Fallujah is only the first step

The problem is what happens once ISIS is gone and the Iraqi government takes over. In 2013, the city’s Sunni residents revolted against the central government in Baghdad because of its sectarian oppression. From their perspective, the Iraqi government under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had begun a systematic oppression of the Sunnis, focused on purging the security forces of Sunnis and arresting leading Sunni politicians.

Today, there is a new, gentler government in Baghdad. It is financially and militarily weak and has made encouraging moves toward decentralization of power and reconciliation with the Sunnis and Kurds. But is still dominated by Shia, it still relies on fiercely sectarian Shia militias for its military strength, and it has failed to achieve any sort of reconciliation with Iraq’s Sunnis.

Without any progress on reconciliation, the Sunnis and Shia in Iraq will continue to see each other at existential enemies. The Iraqi central government, which depends on Iran and various Shia militia for its survival, will not drift naturally toward an inclusive policy.

Indeed, as the Iraqi central government recovers its strength on the back of loans from international financial institutions and US military support, it will likely return to its old efforts at repression. ISIS, as it loses territory, is cooperating in this evolution by resorting to its old strategy of reinforcing the sectarian dynamic in Iraq through a campaign of bombings in Baghdad.

Already, protesters in Baghdad, spurred on by more radical Shia elements, are demanding better security and an end to government corruption, and putting pressure on the government to crack down on the Sunni extremists. It is very easy to see this dynamic spinning out of control once again, and pushing the Sunnis in Fallujah and Iraq generally back into the hands of the next group of extremists (or just ISIS 3.0 — the extremists also tend to repeat themselves in Iraq).

Fallujah is symbolic of the broader flaw in the US strategy in Iraq

Many US officials and analysts believe that Iraq descended into sectarian strife because the US withdrew too early in December 2011. Iraq was still fragile and its communities still unreconciled, so it quickly descended into sectarian chaos once US troops left. This culminated in the ISIS invasion in 2014.

To get it right this time, these same officials and analysts proclaim, the US has to stick it out in Iraq: staying in force, overseeing the Iraqi government, and tamping down sectarian tension until the Iraqi polity is fully matured. How long will this take? John McCain thinks maybe 100 years.

There are, unfortunately, a few problems with this plan.

First, it remains remarkably unclear how just a few thousand troops (there are currently about 4,000 to 5,000 US forces in Iraq) would be able to exercise that kind of influence in Iraq. Currently, US views are important to the Shia power brokers in Iraq because US assistance is necessary to train Iraqi forces and retake ISIS territory — and yet the US has still been unable to push the Iraqi government very far toward sharing power or achieving reconciliation.

Once ISIS is kicked out of the cities, though, the US will lose what little leverage it does have with the Iraqi government. What precisely will US forces do then to stop Shia oppression of the Sunnis or end corruption in the Iraqi government?

The only real way US forces could truly exercise that level of control over the Iraqi government is through an occupation. Experience implies that the Iraqis will not accept that level of interference in their affairs for anything close to a century.

Indeed, on the question of US ground troops, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, whom the US helped put into power in 2014, unequivocally declared: “We don’t want them. We won’t allow them. Full Stop.” Elsewhere, he stated: “Any foreign ground troops on Iraqi soil will be treated as enemy troops.” This does not sound like a recipe for a long-term, peaceful stationing of forces.

Moreover, is it truly realistic to believe that the US public, and future US presidents, will accept a 100-year occupation of Iraq? McCain points out that the US public has accepted precisely that in Germany, Japan, and South Korea.

But except for the brief period immediately after World War II in Japan and Germany, those have not been occupations. The forces were simply stationed there at the request of the government — they played no role in governance and did not get involved in domestic politics. They live a very peaceful existence.

McCain and others, in contrast, are asking US forces in Iraq to exercise 100 years of coercion in Iraq. As McCain himself noted, if US troops in Iraq continue fighting and dying, even in small numbers, the US public will tire of the exercise. At some point in the coming decades (and probably sooner), a future president will offer the US public a way out, much as Obama did in 2011.

At that point, Sen. McCain, seeking reelection for his umpteenth term in the Senate at the tender age of 97, will declare the entire effort to have been wasted and predict that Iraq will fall back into chaos without a reinsertion of US forces.

If that happens, though, don’t worry: The US military will just retake Fallujah. They are very good at it.

It is satisfying and certainly trendy to complain about America’s allies. President Barack Obama unloaded on them recently in an interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, calling them “free riders” who rely on the US for security but refuse to pay back. The commentariat has piled on, with a special focus on deteriorating relations with such perennial malcontents as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey.

The truth is that our allies behave the way they do because we let them. We provide billions of dollars in military and other aid to countries in order to protect and advance US interests, yet we fail to use this leverage to induce the recipients of this aid to behave in a way that actually advances US interests.

That’s because the US has become so focused on maintaining its relationships with its allies above all else that it’s forgotten what the relationships were for in the first place: securing US interests.

In part, this is a holdover from the days of the Cold War, when what mattered was who was on “our side” and who was on the “their side” in the great ideological struggle with the Soviet Union. In other words, it was the alliance relationship itself that mattered more than anything. What our friends did on their own time in their own countries and regions didn’t really matter, as long as they stayed our friends.

But that’s not the world we live in today. In today’s complex world, where most nations pursue cooperative and conflicting policies across different issues, the US should focus less on making our allies happy and more on making them actually behave like allies.

Allies behaving badly

President Obama is hardly the first president to complain about US allies. Indeed, there is a long history of US allies and client states accepting billions of dollars in American military and economic largesse only to pursue policies against US interests or carp about American unreliability. In 1996, then-President Bill Clinton had his first meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After the meeting, in which the leader of one of America’s most pampered allies had lectured Clinton at length, Clinton reportedly fumed, “Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?”

Pakistan is perhaps the most egregious example of an ally behaving badly. As Lawrence Wright has documented, despite (and arguably because of) the billions of dollars the United States has invested in its relationship with Pakistan since 1954, its government (or, more precisely, its military) has diverted US military assistance to build nuclear weapons; harbored Islamic militant groups that kill American soldiers in Afghanistan; sheltered the Taliban and al-Qaeda sympathizers (and probably Osama bin Laden); and gave succor to the AQ Khan network, which became a WMD Walmart for countries like North Korea, Libya, and Iran that were shopping around for equipment and expertise on how to build nuclear weapons.

Egypt is another case: The US has given Egypt billions of dollars in military assistance since 1979, avowedly for the purposes of maintaining Israeli-Egyptian peace, which Egypt manifestly has no interest or intention in breaking. But beyond that, the theory is that by maintaining links with the Egyptian military elite, the US would be in a position create in the Egyptian officer corps a pro-Western force for democratization.

The US should focus less on making our allies happy and more on making them actually behave like allies

Alas, 35 years into that experiment, in July 2013, the Egyptian officer corps overthrew the democratically elected Egyptian government and has since brutally suppressed all opposition to their rule. A US-trained former Army general is now Egypt’s dictator, but he shows little special inclination toward democracy or Western interests.

Saudi Arabia is yet another example. The Saudi regime is totally dependent on US military, logistics, training, and intelligence support. The Kingdom has no strategic alternative to US protection, and its leaders know it. Yet Saudi frequently acts against US interests in the region: trying to stop the Iran nuclear deal, funding Islamic extremist causes across the region, and undermining US efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Syria.

So why do successive administrations continue to provide massive handouts to America’s clients when we often get little — and sometimes worse — in return?

Domestic lobbies and the influence of powerful constituents like the US defense industry no doubt play a role in inhibiting the United States from holding allies and clients to account for behavior that is inimical to US interests. This is especially the case with countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt that procure billions of dollars worth of sophisticated US weapons.

But these defense industrial interests don’t explain why even American allies like Turkey that don’t buy much weaponry get away with these behaviors. And they don’t explain why even those US agencies like the State Department that have little to do with the defense industry consistently advocate for allied interests.

Cold War legacy: either "with us" or "against us"

The better answer is that the Cold War created pathologies that have become deeply embedded in America’s foreign policymaking machinery, and particularly the priority it places on “alliance management.”

During the Cold War, the US conveniently divided the world into those countries who were “with us” or “against us” in the global contest for ideological, military, and geopolitical supremacy between the US and the Soviet Union. The US had a diplomatic playbook for dealing with countries in both categories: reward and buy off your allies and clients in return for their solidarity and support in the fight against communism; contain, punish, isolate, and pressure your enemies for supporting the Soviet Union.

When it came to relations with our allies, what really mattered was that they stood with us in the broader conflict — everything else was easily forgiven or not even noticed in the name of maintaining the alliance. Overall, this philosophy helped maintain an effective anti-Soviet front, even when US allies committed all manner of sins. As was often said about US support for brutal dictators during the Cold War, “he may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

Today, most countries in the world are neither enemies nor vassals of the United States. The US works with Saudi Arabia to maintain stability in the oil market, for example, but winces at its role as “the chief ideological sponsor of Islamist culture.” Egypt supports US efforts to broker a peace deal between Israel and Palestine, but prosecutes US-funded NGO workers, including the son of the US secretary of transportation, for trying to promote democracy in Egypt. Qatar hosts an American air base that is critical in the fight against ISIS, but actively undermines US policy in Libya and Syria, contributing to the chaos in those countries that allows ISIS to thrive.

These relationships are rife with both cooperation and conflict for the simple reason that some US and partner interests are compatible while others clash. Without the Cold War to provide discipline and context for allied deviations, such clashes come to define the relationship. Many of America’s most important foreign relationships fall into this category, but Washington still behaves as if the alliance relationship itself is the most important factor.

How this enables bad behavior by our allies

Reverse Leverage: Many US allies are highly dependent on US support — military, economic, diplomatic, and intelligence — and they should be bending over backward to maintain that support. Yet it is more often Washington that performs the awkward gymnastics, bending over backward to keep relations smooth and assistance flowing.

Qatar, for example, is a tiny country full of natural resources surrounded by neighbors that loathe its government. It is fully dependent on the US for its protection. Yet US officials are afraid to call out Qatar for its actions in Syria and Libya lest the United States lose its military base.

So, rather than leveraging Qatar’s dependence on the US for its entire survival to induce Qatar to stop acting against US interests in Syria and Libya, the US allows Qatar to leverage the US need for a military base in the region to induce the US to shut up and let it do whatever it wants.

Moral Hazard: In the diplomatic version of helicopter parenting, the US protects its client states from suffering the full consequences of their behavior by bailing them out of trouble, incurring the costs and adverse consequences rather than making their putative ally bear the consequences of their actions.

The result is a classic case of “moral hazard.” For example, when Saudi Arabia intervened militarily in Yemen against US advice, the US response was nonetheless to support the intervention, specifically to ensure that Saudi Arabia would not feel the full consequences of failure. Naturally, the lesson that the Saudis learned is that the United States will back them back no matter what they do.

It is more often Washington that performs the awkward gymnastics, bending over backward to keep relations smooth and assistance flowing

And in Yemen, this unconditional support has adversely affected important US interests: The increased violence and chaos caused by Saudi military intervention has empowered al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is based in Yemen and still considered by the US to be a dangerous threat to the US homeland. It has diverted Saudi assets from the campaign against ISIS, and it has escalated the conflict between the Saudis and Iran, which is having a destabilizing effect throughout the region.

Endless Reassurance: President Obama complained in the Atlantic interview that Saudi Arabia’s competition with Iran is helping “to feed proxy wars and chaos” in the Middle East, yet he made a personal trip to Saudi Arabia just last week to reassure the Saudis of the US commitment to Saudi Arabia’s security.

But why should the US care if Saudi Arabia feels like we’re abandoning it?

Rather than trying to reassure the Saudis, the US should be leveraging Saudi fears of abandonment — along with the billions of dollars in arms the US sells Saudi Arabia — to compel it to curb its actions in the region that are feeding proxy wars and chaos.

It's not you, it's me

As one US administration official noted, “Our allies all give us headaches, except for Australia. You can always count on Australia.” That’s great about Australia, but the overall pattern suggests it’s time to start looking closer to home for the source of these problems. If you have one bad ally, you can blame the ally; if you have all bad allies (except Australia), maybe it’s you.

Jeremy Shapiro is Research Director at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Richard Sokolsky is Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

On June 23, the British people, in their infinite wisdom, will vote on whether to leave the European Union — the so-called “Brexit” referendum.

President Barack Obama thinks Brexit is important enough to take a trip to the UK, right in the middle of the highly contentious referendum campaign. So what is at stake for America in the Brexit referendum?

Quite a lot, actually — but not in the ways commonly expressed. Much of the commentary around Brexit focuses on fierce debates about abstruse issues such as budgetary contributions, government benefits for foreign workers, and the future of British trade relations. But from an American perspective, such minutiae are basically irrelevant.

What’s actually at stake is much bigger.

Brexit is the British manifestation of a broader popular revolt against European integration that is gradually spreading across Europe. If the British people choose to abandon the EU at this vulnerable moment, it might well be the catalyst that causes the cancer of populism and disintegration — which is helping to drive this campaign in the UK — to metastasize across Europe at a dramatically faster rate.

If that happens, the entire project of European integration — the foundation of America’s policy in Europe since World War II — could be at risk of collapsing. If that happens, the United States will find itself much more alone in the world and having to bear a much larger share to manage global problems.

European integration solved a major problem

With all the focus today on the problems in the Middle East, it’s easy to forget that for most of the 20th century, Europe was the central US foreign policy problem and the source of massive wars that cost millions of lives. The solution to this problem was European integration — a heavily American project, in large part because it served US interests so well.

And, broadly speaking, it has been an enormous success. Sure, the European Union spends an absurd amount of time failing to decide things and talking about the proper curvature of bananas or the health effects of chlorine-washed chickens. But such technocratic boredom was always the goal for Europe, and it is an infinite improvement over bombing each others’ cities. Europe became peaceful and prosperous, in effect a solved problem after centuries of conflict.

But this success has come under increased pressure in recent years as a series of crises — a financial crisis that threatened Europe’s common currency, a crisis with Russia that threatened Europe’s security, and now a refugee crisis and spate of terrorist attacks that threaten Europe’s open borders — has brutally exposed a fundamental and potentially fatal weakness in the system: the lack of a common European identity.

The problem goes a lot deeper than just Brexit

Brexit is in many ways just the British manifestation of the broader problem that the EU has never solved: There is a common European institution, but not a common European identity.

European integration has had enormous benefits for everyone in terms of promoting peace and economic prosperity through trade and investment. But not everyone feels those benefits in their daily lives. Integration has always been a project that has appealed most to that small stratum of elite, cosmopolitan Europeans who are comfortable ordering overpriced coffee in five different romance languages. For such people, the idea of moving seamlessly across borders, hobnobbing with foreign colleagues, and sitting at the big kids’ table of global diplomacy has evident appeal.

For more rooted folk, the idea of European integration has never contained much romance even if it was making them wealthier behind the scenes. When the general public is asked to vote in referendums on policies that would increase European integration, the referendums frequently fail, even though the policies usually enjoy widespread support from the mainstream political parties. Just last week, Dutch voters overwhelmingly rejected an EU trade agreement with Ukraine, threatening the EU’s effort to integrate Ukraine into Europe in the face of Russian aggression.

These outcomes have become so common that Pierre Hassner, a French political scientist, makes the point that you can ask the Europeans anything you want in a referendum, so long as the answer you want is “no.”

For all the efforts over the years to create pan-European flags and anthems, there is still no sense of a European nation. People remain stubbornly German, French, or Polish rather than European.

Why solidarity matters

This lack of a common identity matters a lot when times get tough. Responding to crises requires a strong sense of solidarity to inspire sacrifices on behalf of distant compatriots.

In the United States, we don’t really have debates about whether New York should help Michigan when the bottom drops out of manufacturing. The federal budget basically creates a transfer from New York to Michigan through unemployment benefits and other federal assistance that hardly any one notices. Our institutions reflect our common American identity, and they provide for more or less automatic solidarity among citizens of different states in tough times.

In Europe, by contrast, the question of who should pay for the financial crisis, host the refugees streaming out of the Middle East, or bear the burden of defending against Russia just as automatically creates a contentious political issue between countries. Germans yell at Greeks to work more; Poles are furious at Italians for wanting to lift sanctions on Russia. Nobody can stand the French. The whole political debate revolves around persistent national stereotypes — the Spanish are lazy, the Italians are disorganized, the Bulgarians are corrupt, etc.

Worse, European national politicians, in an effort to deflect blame, have taken to blaming the EU for all manner of unpopular policies, many of which are actually national decisions. Thus, for example, politicians across Europe blame the EU for the spending cuts and tax increases that come from austerity policies, neglecting to mention that it was the individual nations of Europe that decided on those policies.

These problems of national identity and popular discontent have long festered within the European project, but the crises of the past few years have dramatically amplified them, and popular support for European integration is at an all-time low. All across Europe, populist parties, whose core messages are anti-immigrant xenophobia and an anti-EU return to national sovereignty, are gaining strength. The people are revolting.

Enter Brexit

In the UK, that revolt has taken the form of the Brexit referendum. The European debate in the UK has its own particular national roots, of course. The UK, with its history of empire, its “special relationship” with the United States, and its physical and cultural separateness from “continental Europe,” has always bridled even more than its neighbors at the idea of pooling sovereignty.

But because the debate in the UK is happening at time when the political foundations of Europe are already very weak, a Brexit now has the potential to dramatically hobble the EU. It would remove one of the EU’s most powerful countries, force the EU to absorb itself in the process of divorce for many years, and set a precedent for EU withdrawal that other anti-EU populist parties would certainly follow.

As such parties achieve ever greater influence across Europe, the continued viability of the entire European integration project would be in serious jeopardy.

A disintegrating Europe would be bad for the US — and the world

The collapse of European integration could potentially mean an end to the stability, order, and prosperity that the US worked very hard and spent a lot of money to help Europe achieve. And while it’s unlikely we’d see a return to anything like the 20th century’s massive world wars, the consequences could still extend far beyond Europe’s borders.

That’s because a chaotic, unstable Europe would be unable (and probably unwilling) to help the US confront geopolitical challenges around the world, including the chaos in the Middle East and rising tensions in Asia. And the economic disruption that would likely result from the breakup of the EU would only exacerbate the problem.

The United States has long wanted Europe to step up as a geopolitical partner — taking responsibility for security problems in its own neighborhood as well as doing more to help the United States deal with geopolitical issues around the world, including in the Middle East and Asia — but has been consistently disappointed when it didn’t happen.

But in recent years this had at least begun to change: Europe spearheaded the response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, contributed tens of thousands of troops to US efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and led military operations against Islamist extremists in sub-Saharan Africa.

Through the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a transatlantic economic integration effort, the United States also hopes to leverage the combined weight of the US and European economies to shape the set the future rules for international trade and investment before the Chinese do.

But if Brexit proceeds and European disintegration gathers pace, Europe will be likely useless for all of these purposes. Obsessed with its own internal problems, it will fail to take the lead in standing up to Russia, it will fail to contribute to security in Africa or the Middle East, and it will lack the coherence to negotiate trade and investment partnerships with the United States or anyone else. That means the burden of managing all these issues will once again fall on the US.

Brexit is not the source of Europe’s trend of disintegration. But if it happens, it could be the beginning of the end for the most successful US foreign policy ever and a serious blow to US efforts to maintain stability and order in Europe and therefore beyond. That seems worth caring about.