Martin Luther King Jr. once said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. There is a policy equivalent worth sitting with: the arc of major policy validation is long, but it bends, eventually, toward the truth. It just takes about a decade to get there.
Three major decisions made roughly ten years ago — in Britain, Germany, and Taiwan — are now revealing their full consequences. The pattern is striking, and the lesson is uncomfortable: errors that experts flagged at the outset took a full decade to become undeniable, and by then, the politicians who made them had long since left office.
Britain: The Brexit Bill Comes Due
Last week, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer delivered what observers widely described as the most pro-European speech by a sitting British prime minister in nearly a decade. Confronting what he called "a dangerous world we must face together," Starmer acknowledged that Brexit had inflicted profound damage on the British economy and called for a bolder partnership with the European Union. Many read it as the opening of a door toward eventual re-engagement with Europe.
Brexit was sold to British voters on a promise of reclaimed sovereignty and economic liberation. In the June 2016 referendum, 51.9 percent voted to leave the EU. Proponents argued that Britain would thrive outside the single market — free from budget contributions, free from labour competition, free to strike its own trade deals. Britain formally left the EU in January 2020.
Those promises contradicted the basic logic of free trade and open economies. Ten years on, the verdict is clear. Depending on the estimate, Brexit has reduced British GDP by roughly 8 to 10 percent. Long-term productivity has fallen by around 4 percent. Trade flows — both imports and exports — have dropped by approximately 15 percent. Workers from Eastern Europe who had filled essential roles in healthcare, logistics, and agriculture could no longer obtain work visas. Cross-border commerce now requires customs queues and extensive documentation, causing supply chain delays, production stoppages, and a steady exodus of businesses relocating to the European continent. Every one of these consequences was warned about before the vote. All of them came to pass.
Germany: The Cost of Strategic Complacency
Germany presents a parallel story. For years, it was held up as a model economy — export-driven, industrially strong, and strategically managed. That model rested on three pillars constructed during Angela Merkel's chancellorship: cheap Russian energy, access to the Chinese market, and a nuclear phase-out that followed Japan's Fukushima disaster in 2011.
Each of those pillars has since collapsed. Russia's invasion of Ukraine ended the era of affordable Russian gas. China's industrial rise has eroded the competitive position of German exporters in their most important overseas market — and Chinese manufacturers, including automakers, are now competing directly on European soil.
Looking back, the Merkel-era formula — abandon nuclear power, deepen dependence on Russian energy, and tie the economy's fate to China — appears not as pragmatic statecraft but as compounded strategic error. French President Emmanuel Macron made this point directly. "When Germans shut down all their nuclear plants at once, what did they do?" he asked. "They developed renewables, yes — but they also massively restarted thermal and coal power, worsening their carbon footprint. That is not good for the planet, and I will not do the same."
Taiwan: The Nuclear-Free Homeland and Its Aftermath
Taiwan's own version of this story is its nuclear phase-out policy. The Democratic Progressive Party built its anti-nuclear platform over decades, and after Tsai Ing-wen took office in 2016, the policy was implemented in full. One by one, Taiwan's nuclear plants were shut down and placed on the path to decommissioning. The goal of a nuclear-free homeland was declared achieved.
Less than a year later, Tsai's successor, Lai Ching-te, signalled a willingness to restart nuclear power generation. The DPP has never formally admitted the policy was wrong. But the reversal itself is the admission.
Experts and academics had warned for years that abandoning nuclear power — Taiwan's most reliable low-carbon baseload source — would drive up costs, increase carbon emissions, and threaten energy security. Those warnings were dismissed. Ten years later, after every reactor had been shut down and decommissioning had begun, the government began quietly walking back what it had once celebrated. Taiwan has paid a price measured in the trillions of dollars, in both direct costs and economic opportunity lost.
The DPP's decade-long posture of confrontation toward Beijing follows a similar logic — an approach reinforced by US strategic competition with China, but one that has steadily raised tensions across the strait and left difficult questions about long-term sustainability unanswered. The costs of that posture, like those of the nuclear phase-out, may take another few years to fully crystallise.
The Architecture of Accountability
In each of these cases — Brexit, Germany's energy strategy, Taiwan's nuclear phase-out — external shocks accelerated the damage: the war in Ukraine, the geopolitical fracturing of global supply chains, the surge in electricity demand driven by artificial intelligence. But the external shocks did not cause the failures. They exposed and amplified errors that were already embedded in the original policy design. The core mistakes were visible to those who looked carefully at the time.
There is, however, a deeply frustrating feature of this ten-year validation cycle: it provides near-perfect political insulation for those responsible. By the time the consequences become undeniable, the decision-makers have moved on. Boris Johnson, who championed Brexit, had already left Downing Street. Merkel's reputation has taken some damage, but she faces no accountability. Tsai completed two full presidential terms and, as she herself noted, what happens after 2024 is no longer her concern.
The arc of policy consequence bends toward truth. But it bends slowly — slowly enough for the architects of serious mistakes to escape the reckoning entirely.
One small consolation: none of us need to go back and relearn introductory economics. The textbooks were right all along. （Related： Taiwan's Potato Problem Exposes the True Cost of the Trade Deal ｜ Latest ）
