A map of the UK is seen behind British Prime Minister Theresa May as she delivers a speech on Brexit at Mansion House in London on March 2, 2018 | Leon Neal/AFP via Getty Images Forget the cliff edge, Brexit faces an abyss As Brexit talks shift to the future relationship, a yawning gulf in expectations has opened up.

Up until now, Brussels and London could at least agree on what the Brexit talks were failing to achieve.

Phase 1 was about the core terms of a divorce decree, still unfinished. Phase 2's opening round was about a transition deal, also not yet agreed. But as negotiators now turn their focus to the future relationship, there is not even consensus on what they are working toward.

After two weeks of big pronouncements — new draft negotiating guidelines put forward by European Council President Donald Tusk on Wednesday, a major speech last Friday by U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May, a full draft withdrawal treaty published by the EU's chief negotiator, Michel Barnier — the one point most sharply in focus is that the EU and the U.K. still have starkly opposite goals: London needs to make Brexit look good and Brussels to prove it is a grave mistake.

"I often call Brexit a damage-limitation exercise," Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel said at a news conference with Tusk on Wednesday. "There will be no winner after the Brexit. Both sides will be losing. Minimizing the losses and limiting the negative impacts as much as possible ... is the challenge we all face around the table," Bettel said.

For its part, Brussels is still holding out hope that the U.K. will make a significant shift.

May's speech, while nodding to some of the tough realities — "hard facts" as she called them — drew a sharply different conclusion. "I know that the United Kingdom I treasure can emerge from this process a stronger, more cohesive nation," she declared, adding: "I am in no doubt that whatever agreement we reach with the EU, our future is bright."

More prosaically, Tusk's draft negotiating guidelines called for developing an "overall understanding of the framework for the future relationship that will be elaborated in a political declaration."

Based on the U.K.'s insistence on quitting the EU's single market and customs union, Tusk said only one ultimate goal was possible: a free-trade agreement that he proposed to cover all goods, with zero tariffs, and perhaps some services, "to an extent."

But the next months will not be about negotiating the precise terms of a free-trade deal.

And where the EU seems content to draw up a broad outline of such an accord, the U.K. is eager to get to specifics. Where the EU says it is impossible to offer any guarantee that anything drawn up in the short term will ultimately be agreed in future negotiations after Brexit, the U.K. wants assurances of what it will get in exchange for the financial obligations it accepts under the withdrawal treaty.

And what is a political declaration anyway? Will it be like the political association agreements the EU signs with prospective member countries? Or is it little more than a list of mutually agreeable, but hardly binding, aspirations?

Canada vs. Norway

In some cases, the two sides are making diametrically opposite pronouncements.

"We will not accept the rights of Canada and the obligations of Norway," May declared in her speech on Friday in London, referring to Norway's EU budget payments and obligation to accept free movement, plus Canada's relatively slim benefits under a free-trade accord.

A senior EU official describing Brussels' continued dismay over May's demands said: "In political terms, it sounds to us as a combination of the rights of Norway and the obligations of Canada and that, as we have explained many times ... will not work either."

Tusk's guidelines made no specific mention of financial services — a pointed message to Britain, which is keen on finding a way to protect London's lucrative banking sector.

At the news conference with Bettel, Tusk offered what might be the most plainspoken and honest explanation yet for why the EU is unwilling to carve out special exceptions for the U.K.

"A pick-and-mix approach for a non-member state is out of the question," Tusk declared. "We are not going to sacrifice these principles. It's simply not in our interest."

And yet Tusk's guidelines make clear that the EU is open to picking-and-mixing for its own advantage. In proposing a trade accord on goods "covering all sectors" with "zero tariffs and no quantitative restrictions," the guidelines also demand "existing reciprocal access to fishing waters and resources" — a provision that would clearly benefit the EU, though the bloc is dangling U.K. access to sell fish in the single market in return.

The draft guidelines call for "no gap in EU-U.K. cooperation" on security, defense and foreign affairs, even as they seem to rule out U.K. participation in certain regulatory institutions, like the European Medicines Agency.

Fear of a cliff edge

Even as the wide gap in expectations and interests has grown more apparent, the end-game of Brexit seems increasingly murky.

EU officials say they retain some hope that fear of the so-called cliff edge and the potential economic disaster of a disorderly withdrawal will keep London focused on reaching an overall deal. But the senior EU official acknowledged that there was no clarity yet on how the discussions in the coming months might reach a conclusion — only that they effectively need to wrap up by October.

For its part, Brussels is still holding out hope that the U.K. will make a significant shift. Clause 13 in Tusk's guidelines is probably overly optimistic in leaving open the possibility that the U.K. will abandon its red lines and decide to stay in the customs union and single market.

"If these positions were to evolve," the guidelines state, "the Union will be prepared to reconsider its offer."

Until then, Brussels says it is waiting for the U.K. to offer up new and brilliant ideas: proposals, for example, on the Northern Ireland border, or on customs arrangements, regulatory alignment and legal constructs for dispute resolution that have not so far been forthcoming.

"We find it implausible that there should be some sort of easy way to achieve the same objectives which more or less no one has discovered until now," the senior EU official said. "We think that it is an implausible notion that what we have been doing [in the EU] was not actually necessary, there is an easier way to achieve the same objectives, that ... everybody in Europe working on this for the last 60 years made a big mistake."