Everyone can remain calm because the British vote to exit the European Union won’t translate into any “cataclysmic changes,” President Barack Obama said in an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep. Rather, he views the Brexit vote as a “pause button” that has been pressed on the “project of full European integration.”

“I would not overstate it,” Obama added in the interview released Tuesday. “There’s been a little bit of hysteria post-Brexit vote, as if somehow NATO’s gone, the trans-Atlantic alliance is dissolving, and every country is rushing off to its own corner. That’s not what’s happening.”

He views the result as a consequence of a “European project that was probably moving faster and without as much consensus as it should have.”

The EU has been riddled with complications since its inception, he said. Namely, its monetary union has been difficult to manage and the EU government, which has also had to work in tandem with national governments, has been criticized for being “overly bureaucratic and deadlocked.”

Going forward, Europe now needs to take a breath, he said, and “figure out how to maintain some of our national identities” and “preserve the benefits of integration.”

What won’t change, he argued, are “the basic core values of Europe, the tenets of liberal, market-based democracies.”

He also assured that the United States’ ties to Europe will remain strong given shared interests and international concerns.