Beware the Hydra

Subject: Beware the Hydra.

As the Brexit deal stutters forward, sometimes hurdles, sometimes clarity of purpose, we seem to zig zag between and around the obstacles, kicking some into the long grass as just too hard but always in the knowledge we will have to come back to them before the deal is consummated.
Much of it is like the conversation in a funeral parlour, stilted, acknowledging a dreadful event has occurred but knowing it has, that there's no going back, wishing at all costs to show there is no ill feeling
The sheer profundity required in unzipping and then reassembling 40 years of intricate legal diplomacy is mind boggling. It's not like a divorce where one of the parties leaves and the locks are changed it's as if the keys are still valued and access to the pantry and kitchen is ok but definitely not the bedroom. It's a divorce of convenience and like a marriage of convenience is based on something other than love.
The well rehearsed arguments of economic nurturing versus economic empowerment seem no nearer to being resolved.
Mrs May has been on a trip to South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya those old colonial stalwarts, hoping to drum up business. Mrs Merkel has also been about in Africa, also drumming the trade drum in Senegal, Ethiopia and interestingly also Nigeria.
All of course are treading on the coat tails of China who is well established in Africa with soft loan projects all over the continent, cannily,  turning the clock back they have imported over a million workers from china to ensure the projects get done on time and within budget.
With the Americans pulling out of their "world role" under President Trump the Chinese with their vast current account surplus see, much like the Americans after WW2 an opportunity to swamp foreign economies with loans and infrastructure projects such that these countries will be for ever indebted. If you fail to keep up repayments, like Sri Lanka, then they expropriate a city port such as Hanbantota for their own strategic purpose. This of course is exactly what the Americans did, all around the world as their power and hegemony grew after the war. Allies such as Britain were leaned upon to relinquish land and infrastructure in payment for the loans Britain was forced to make for fighting the facist for Europe.

History tells us much but we learn little.  If a successful Brexit is made impossible by the French, who's very existence can in no small part be due to our tenacity to continue to fight the war after they were defeated and overrun. Especially our ability to convince the Americans to join us in the fight.  Or the Germans veto any deal since it is they who in the end have come out victorious, without the taint of fascism but rather through their power of organisation and the investment in both people and industry (something we never learnt to do).
Perhaps as a small island state we can become a theme park with organised tours for visitors to gawp at, reflecting how quaint life was before the global Hydra arrived.