Douglas Carswell, M.P., has presented the case for “Why Britain Needs A Strong America.” My own contribution to this forum might equally well be titled “Why America Needs a Strong Britain.” I hold that both propositions are true. The actual title I chose is “After the Brexit,” “Brexit” being the term which has arisen lately to describe the idea of a complete British exit from the European Union, but this should not be taken to mean that I am predicting with any certainty that Britain will leave the European Union. I do not pretend to be a prophet. If I were forced to estimate what I thought the odds are of a complete British exit, it would be somewhere between 40 to 60 percent that it will leave the European Union by the year 2020. The actual outcome, however, is so very dependent on events that such a prediction would be of little value at this point.

What is of value now is an exercise in rational planning. To give a historical parallel, recall the situation in 1995, when Canada was approaching the Second Quebec Referendum, and the polling predicted the vote in favor of Quebec secession at around 50 percent. In other words, it was statistically within the margin of error, and it was thus obvious that there was a good chance it might come to pass. Most of the large corporations in North America had, by that point, begun undertaking contingency planning to examine what would