Quotation from an current NPR article on the effect of Brexit:

“Matthias Matthijs, a political economist at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, says the U.S. had already been gravitating toward Germany long before the Brexit vote. Matthijs says the Germans have been taking the lead in a number of recent crises.

“We’ve had the euro [currency] crisis where Germany was at the wheel, the crisis over Ukraine with Russia, Germany diplomacy was at the heart of this … and then the refugee crisis, the fallout of the Syria conflict, again, here you’ve seen Germany take the lead,” he says.

“We have extraordinarily close relations on a government-to-government level; there’s very little daylight in all the major issues that we are facing,” he says. The relationship will intensify as “the management of that Brexit is unfolding,” Wittig says.

“While the U.K. may lose its special status as a bridge to the European Union, it will continue to play a lead role when it comes to intelligence, Matthijs says.

“The intelligence cooperation between MI6 and the CIA is very close, internally as well between FBI and MI5,” he says. “And these are links that have been established since World War II and are ongoing. I mean they’re very, very, very close relations, very close cooperators.”

“Matthijs says Britain’s departure from the EU may even help strengthen NATO, because the U.K. may want to show it’s still very much part of the Western alliance — even if the special relationship with the U.S. fades. But the U.K. is expected to take a sharp economic hit for leaving the EU, and questions remain about how it will be able to afford to beef up its military.”

Part of the point of the EU was originally to enfold Germany into the community of European nations, and to have France and the UK in particular, as restraints and counterweights to German economic power.  At the beginning a majority of EU civil servants were actually British.  Already, Germany is accused of treating the smaller EU countries as sort-of economic colonies, its banks lending to facilitate purchases of German manufactured goods. EU expansion has been driven by Germany ( what were the British thinking?)  Now, the old idea of restraining it is dead, and the effects of that will unfold before our eyes.

Meanwhile, the UK is valued for its intelligence??