At 11:00 p.m. on December 31, 2020, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland finally left the European Union, forty-eight years after it had joined its predecessor organization, the European Economic Community. The United Kingdom left four and a half years after the binary referendum of June 23, 2016, when it had voted by 51.9 percent to 48.1 to do so, and eleven months after embarking on a “transition” while the United Kingdom and the European Union sought a post-departure “deal”—a term covering not only tariff-free trade, but also cooperation on matters such as security and crime and regulation. The European Union, which is already economically moribund, was worried that without continuing to impose a level of unnecessary regulation on the United Kingdom, the departing country would obtain a competitive advantage over the bloc. When a deal was finally concluded on Christmas Eve, both sides, inevitably, claimed it as a triumph. The document enumerating the “deal” runs to 1,266 pages: it will be some time before it is absolutely clear what price has been paid for Britons’ ability to drink champagne, claret, and chianti tariff-free for the indefinite future. One of the first details to rise from the verbiage was that the United Kingdom’s ability to have complete control of its own waters for fishery purposes—one of the most outrageous surrenders of sovereignty made upon joining the bloc—had been postponed until the summer of 2026. Given the typically inflated rhetoric of Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, about