After more than twenty years of pushing Western institutions ever eastward under the flag of a “Euro-Atlantic” order, the United States needs to re-accentuate the “Atlantic” side of the equation, including through cultural cooperation. Consultation and cooperation with Canada, Iceland and Norway, fellow members with the United States in the Arctic Council, and the UK, can be stepped up.

Looking five years down the road, there is a good chance that the experts will be proven wrong once again and that Britain, in defiance of the dire warnings of the “Remain” campaign, will be doing just fine. Scotland may be the most daunting of the challenges faced by the country, but London will survive the disruptions to its banking and service sectors and remain the great city it has always been. Young Britons will find ways to connect with the continent, and trade and investment will continue under any reasonable set of WTO-compliant agreements. The Europeans and the British will continue to interact, bilaterally, in NATO, in the OECD and in a thousand other fora, governmental and nongovernmental. With the right leadership, the UK might even begin to tackle longstanding social and economic problems which, as in the United States, have accumulated over the years under the strains of globalization, widening income inequality, and decaying social capital.

The real challenge for U.S. foreign policy is more likely to be the EU. Saddled with an economically crippled Greece, ringed by instability to the east and south, faced with terrorism and a host of other problems, it has no obvious path forward. Populist movements are on the rise, raising at least the possibility of further exits. EU elites, especially those nearest to the Brussels bureaucracy, are notoriously thin-skinned about criticism of the European project, and will not want to hear advice from Americans. Calls for the British to accelerate the exit so the remaining members can get on with consolidating and revitalizing the Union—“more Europe”—reflect what is likely to be the prevailing mood, the combination of anger and injured pride that one sees in old EU warhorses like commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. European leaders talk about reform, but having systematically closed off alternative paths they find it difficult—psychologically, intellectually, politically and legally—to contemplate radical changes that the public would recognize as real reform. The shock of the British exit might lead to real change—but this is only to be hoped.

It will be difficult for Americans to help. Europe has long been politicized in American domestic debates, as the right deplores Europe’s “socialism” and its inability to defend itself, and the left admires Europe’s “multilateralism” and perceived commitment to social equality. This trend is now set to intensify, with the Trump forces welcoming the British electorate’s strike against the unaccountable elites, and the Clinton camp highlighting the racism and isolationism said to have motivated the 17.4 million voters who chose “leave.” Such debates hamper any American effort to engage with either the British or the Europeans about what went wrong and how to move ahead. While it would be too much to ask the campaigns to keep Brexit out of their rhetoric, those who consider themselves foreign-policy experts should try to think about Europe in terms of Europe itself, and not as an extension of the American debate.

The United States cannot “save” the EU, but American foreign-policy thinkers and political leaders need to think seriously about what might be done to ease the pressures building in and around Europe. A solution to the conflict in Syria, stabilization of the situation in Libya, progress against ISIS and Islamic terrorism, and reaching a modus vivendi with Russia all would help. All are difficult, but all should be high on the agenda of the next administration.

John Van Oudenaren is the author of a textbook on the EU, Uniting Europe: An Introduction to the European Union (Second edition, Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), and is completing a book on the Atlantic idea in American foreign policy from 1871 to the present. He is Director of Scholarly and Educational Programs at the Library of Congress. He writes in a personal capacity.

Image: Thomson 120 mm Platoon during fire exercise​. Wikimedia Commons/Allied Joint Force Command Brunssum