It was political realism that got Keir Starmer to say that the UK will not rejoin the EU or the single market in his lifetime. You cannot join the single market without accepting free movement. You cannot join the EU without joining the euro.

Where Starmer is less realistic is in his assertion that he can get a better deal. The EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, as it is formally known, is a bog-standard EU trade deal, with a bit of fish added. The single most important revision to that treaty already happened. This was Rishi Sunak’s Windsor framework that removed the customs border in the Irish Sea. Pragmatism came in the form of red and green-coloured customs lanes in seaports. Maybe in a future treaty revision the EU and the UK find ways to reduce immigration queues for tourists or border checks for goods. This would be great. It would still be the same deal.

Where I see much bigger potential for co-operation not with the EU on trade but with member states on defence. During the Nato summit in Washington, the defence ministers of Germany, France, Poland and Italy signed a letter of intent to build a new generation of medium-range cruise missiles. The UK is not a member of that group, but it would make sense for the UK to join this critical project. Defence is not the business of the EU but of national governments. The UK and France are already co-operating closely on defence through the Lancaster House treaties from 2010.

The EU’s role in security policy is to co-ordinate. Unanimity still rules, and member states mostly follow their national interests.

If the EU were serious about defence – which I doubt – they would start with defence procurement. This would be about as integrationist as it would get. The idea would be, literally, to get more bang for the buck. For this to succeed all participants in a defence procurement union would have to let go off their cosy defence monopolies. The main obstacle here is not going to be the UK, but France. Given the current state of French politics, I struggle to see this.

This leaves other bilateral and multilateral agreements, like the one on cruise missiles, as the most realistic way forward. That would especially so if Donald Trump came to power and force the European Nato members to take care of their own defence.

And dare I say it, real pragmatists do not only co-operate, but they also compete. There are opportunities for the UK in several high-tech areas, like artificial intelligence and next generation pharmaceuticals where the UK’s more liberal regulatory regime will play to its advantage. This would risk conflict with the EU, but not one the UK should seek to avoid. The EU sees high-tech less as an opportunity than as a threat. Last decade, it passed the absurdly intrusive general data protection regulation – which the UK inherited. More recently, the EU was the first in the world to regulate AI. They also one of the first with a comprehensive crypto-regulation. With the digital markets act from 2022, the EU regulates digital gatekeepers like search engines and social networks. The reason behind the EU’s intrusive regulation is that they have no skin in the game. Only four of the world’s largest 50 IT companies are from the EU.

When the UK was still a member, the EU was economically more successful and more liberal, its technophobia was obvious than today. Starmer would set himself up for failure if he tried to emulate the EU as it goes through its Luddite phase. The EU has fallen behind the US and China in several key 21st century technologies like artificial intelligence, electric cars and solar panels. The On its own, the UK won’t be able to take on the US and China, but it may be to carve out a few lucrative niches. Unilateral regulatory alignment makes no sense.

Any successful foreign policy towards Europe would need to start with the dual recognition that the EU and UK face similar problems, but that the EU is not the same force in the world it was ten years ago.