With the appointment of Joe Biden as President-Elect, the geopolitical map is being refashioned faster than the previous lines can be fuzzily drawn. While the world fixes on the monumental domestic consequences of this change of governance, it’s the international fallout which offers a more tantalising glimpse into how events will unfold across a world still largely shaped by US hegemony. The deceit, the revanchist, and the delusion-laden doctrine of Brexit and Trumpism are interchangeable for all intents and purposes, so now Trump’s populist exercise in self-adoration has been sidelined from central policy, what gives for a Brexit endgame which has leaned so heavily, albeit slyly, on the Orange Emperor’s blessing? What now that a seventy-eight year-old multilateralist with Irish blood flowing through his ageing veins will be stepping into the breach?

The prospects for a unilateralist Brexit have changed with the jettisoning of Donald Trump from power. That much is clear, in spite of Downing St’s cageyness. The days of English hubris are numbered. For four years Donald Trump provided cover for a buccaneering Brexit model that mirrored his natural state of chaos, but to what extent will his unceremonious removal change the rules of the negotiating game? Will Johnson set new policy parameters on Britain’s relationship with Europe seeing that his moral cheerleader, Trump, will find his rambling Tweets no longer carry the gravity they once did?

Here is how the Tories are now in check. As the whole world except Trump already knows, gone is the uber-advocate of self-determinism to be replaced by Biden, whose political instincts favour heavily the re-normalisation of relations with the EU into a strategic alliance to counter the growing might of China and her minions. His will be a continuation of Obama-era foreign policy by other means. In point of fact, the means might actually be not so different than the Obama years, which is telling because Britain’s long autopsy on Brexit has been done under the aegis of Trump’s nativist brand of US Republicanism. The fallout of the referendum has been acutely felt almost entirely during Trump’s four years in office. Britain henceforth finds itself in uncharted territory. She can no longer break treaties and trample on good faith with her ridiculous exigencies that find their bloody-minded roots in that self-same feeling of exceptionalism that ran like a golden thread through Trump’s nationalist platform. When he is not putting out spot fires back home, Biden will restore a multilateral basis to international relations. Damage limitation will be his modus operandi of foreign policy. After four years in a whacked-out wilderness, the US needs to return to the family of nations to aid in the restructuring of the global political order to something like its former self, which ran broadly along ideological lines (democracy or autocracy; rogue or reliable). It will do this not by making unreasonable demands or by threatening to storm off if if doesn’t get its own way, rather by rejoining multilateralist efforts to stem 21st century global threats and influence opportunities. Brexit represents an existential threat to the sanctity of union with a democratic coalition from Lisbon to Athens, and so Biden will push even harder against the radicals in the Tory party – Britain’s own GOP – who represent a radical element that see personal gain in free-trade libertarianism. To Biden, Brexit is Trumpite foreign policy in another guise.

For a start, Joe Biden is a proud Irish-American. He’s a straight talker who one imagines stands baffled at the waffle that trips off Johnson’s tongue. He’s already said it himself, Brexit ain’t gonna jeopardise the Irish Peace Process come what may. The problem is, sovereign independent nations tend to draw up hard borders in the face of larger sovereign blocs. Switzerland is an exception but for geographical and historical reasons which Britain cannot and must not try to emulate. As yet, there is no fixed solution to the problem of what to do and how to act when faced with a land border between a newly independent Britain and a long-standing EU member, the Irish Republic. They tried sketching an invisible line through the Irish Sea until fools in the cabinet belatedly realised that Northern Ireland would be effectively annexed to the European Union. Dismemberment of the 300 year-old Union was not what the Tory Brexiteers spearheaded by Gove and Johnson had in mind. Their answer was to breach International law rewriting the Withdrawal Agreement, a fact not lost on Biden who would routinely wince at Trump’s cavalier approach to ripping up treaties willy-nilly. What must he think about the bungling involved in Brexit then?

The new Washington administration will seek to consolidate ties with Berlin and Paris, while holding a special place in the President-Elect’s heart for the Emerald Isle. This volte-face in US policy places Britain out on a limb. Her ostracism from an emerging global consensus will be even harder felt exactly at a time when the long warm-up is over and the UK finally has to go it alone. The EU will be bolstered by the results of the most bitterly-fought US Election in living memory. Downing Street will be frantically revising its options, in other words scrambling to ingratiate itself with the new Democratic administration before Biden hardens his pro-EU/Irish stance even more. Much as they try to sell a rebranded Brexit to Biden/Harris, they will fail as all salesman do when they try plugging a crap product. Fact-fudging, policy backtracking and cringeworthy obsequiousness to rising foreign powers on the part of the Tory government will come to characterise the next twelve months of what is turning out to be a rudderless leadership, a busted flush of a governing class that set out on their decade-long crusade to degrade future prospects for the average Briton, while still managing to impress half the nation by sounding off like a bunch off privileged blowhards egging on the school rugby team that faces imminent relegation to lower leagues.

Brexit is not going to wash with Biden, and rightly so. The present vision of it is pure mirage full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Sound faintly familiar to the incumbent president who refuses to leave office without a fight, or at least a 9-hole playoff on one of his soon-to-be-liquidated golf courses? He too loved a good la-dee-da that, like Brexit, had plenty of chorus but no verse.

The presidential inauguration is set for the third week of January. This roughly corresponds with the end of the Withdrawal Agreement and the start of the Brexit reality. Politics is that game with no winners, but a game nonetheless. Johnson plots his next move vis-a-vis Brussels with renewed caution. He does not want to be caught offside on the wrong side of history as the rearguard floods forward out of defence. It’s not Britain he fears for more than it is himself and his own political extinction. He is another pompous discard waiting to happen. He is another controversial court jester in a new age of conciliatory politics. But Johnson has come too far with Brexit not to want to avoid seeing it turn out like that DIY barbecue set that a ham-fisted Homer Simpson tried to assemble. You remember The Simpson’s episode right? The unrecognisable jumble of cement, bricks and grille that ended up feted by the critics as a postmodern masterpiece, propelling Homer from backyard flunky to darling of the Springfield art world. Brexit might be postmodern but in its present format (and one senses in every possible format) it ain’t no masterpiece. Artless Boris might well botch it, but unlike Homer he won’t be anyone’s darling, least of all the art world. He’ll end up another poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and is heard no more.

As for that free-trade agreement with the US you’ve been angling for? That one just slipped down Joe and Kamala’s priority list.

Watch out, Boris, Joe is coming and he’s wearing green and gold. To quote an Irish poet who must have felt, in his day, the pernicious influence of his Anglo-Saxon neighbours across the sea, tread softly because you tread on my dreams.