Michel Barnier, the EU’s former chief Brexit negotiator, has suggested that the time is now right for the UK and EU to sign a treaty on defence and foreign policy cooperation.
This is the clearest indication yet that the EU is interested in cultivating a new and improved foreign affairs relationship with the UK after Brexit. The bad news, however, is that the smoke signals from Brussels are unlikely to be positively received by the present UK government. Britain simply isn’t willing to consider a formal collaboration in these areas.
As will be remembered, the governments of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss took an unhelpfully combative approach towards Brussels, making talk of cooperation difficult.
