The UK and USA
An interesting article in The Times today:https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/brexiteers-beware-america-only-looks-after-itself-q2ggk7jdj"Maybe some point down the line there might be a UK-US trade agreement but it’s not going to happen any time soon because our focus is in negotiating with a big bloc — the European Union — to get a trade agreement done and the UK is going to be in the back of the queue.”Opinion is divided about the impact of President Obama’s intervention in the 2016 European referendum. Remainers look on it as one of their few good days. In his memoirs, David Cameron says he was “delighted with the intervention. Obama was basically saying that all the ‘It’ll be OK’ assumptions from Leave were false.”Yet many on the Leave campaign saw it as a turning point in their favour. Leave voters, they argued, resented being told what to think by a foreigner. Especially if he was put up to it by the British government as revealed, they asserted, by the telltale use of “queue” rather than the more natural American “line”.So they hit back with an article by Boris Johnson that many believe helped to create some of the momentum for their victory.What matters now, of course, is not who is right about the impact of Obama’s comments. That’s one for political scientists and historians. What matters now, especially as we contemplate not merely a soft divorce from the EU but a rupture, is who was right on the substance. Was Obama correct about Britain’s place in the queue after Brexit?This is a broader question than it seems. While the president was talking specifically about trade, there is also a queue for diplomatic attention and co-operation on matters of strategic importance.Brexiteers assume that, by turning our backs on European integration, Britain can take its place as a leading partner in the Anglosphere and become the economic, political and security partner of the United States in a truly special relationship. Obama wasn’t just talking about free movement of chicken, he was challenging the Leavers’ assumption.We should recall that President Obama’s position on Brexit was the standard American one, the one it has held since the Second World War. Indeed, there is a good case to make that European integration was as much the project of the United States as it was of France or Germany.Dean Acheson, the architect of Harry Truman’s foreign policy in the immediate postwar years, saw the reconstruction of Europe as central to America’s safety. First, there would be financial assistance through the Marshall Plan to ward off economic collapse; second, a military alliance through the creation of Nato to protect western Europe against the Soviet Union; and third, European integration to prevent another internal west European conflict.Acheson was frustrated by British resistance to the third part of his plan. He thought us a “bewildered country” that would become “a slightly more world-conscious Sweden”. And in 1962 he memorably described Britain as having lost an Empire but not yet found a role.Although the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, dismissed these words as underestimating Britain, his application for membership of the European Economic Community suggests he was rather more sympathetic to Acheson’s analysis than he was willing to acknowledge.While other American statesmen have been more tactful than Acheson none, until the present era, has departed much from his position. Is there any reason to believe this has changed?The evidence that it has changed starts strongly. Donald Trump has been firmly in favour of Brexit, almost embarrassingly effusive about Boris Johnson and encouraging of the idea that a trade deal might be struck quite quickly, ushering in a new phase of our partnership. And Donald Trump, after all, is president.Not just president but head of a political movement that has always been sympathetic to Britain as a military ally and a fellow advocate of free markets. It approves of the assertion of national identity that Brexit involves and reveres Margaret Thatcher as Ronald Reagan’s comrade in arms (although comrade isn’t a word she wouldhave liked).Yet to treat this as the reliable foundation of a deeper future partnership is an error.To start with the simplest point, Donald Trump may not be president for much longer. He has an election to fight next year, the outcome of which is highly uncertain. Any Democratic president, and probably even an alternative Republican in due course, will revert to Acheson’s policy.And the president is not the only actor. Treaties such as a new UK-US trade deal require a two-thirds majority in the Senate for ratification. This means obtaining Democratic support as well as Republican. A breach with Ireland would make that hard.But assume Mr Trump has five more years left rather than one and has a reasonably free hand. Is he someone Britain can rely on? There’s the mercurial nature of his personality to consider. This is a man who dismissed his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, in a tweet without telling him first. We wouldn’t be secure in our relationship even if we were married to him.Beyond this, there is his political outlook. Some Americans opposed Acheson in the 1940s because they preferred isolation to engagement with the world, and Trump is their heir. His explanation for withdrawing US troops from northern Syria and paving the way for a Turkish invasion was this: it is “time to get out of these ridiculous endless wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home . . . We’re like a police force. We’re not fighting. We’re policing.” This act and this statement are an important moment in American foreign policy.Now, even the most internationalist administrations in Washington, and those most concerned with British opinion, have diverged sharply from this country’s views when their own interests were at stake.Ronald Reagan saw Margaret Thatcher as perhaps his greatest political friend and ally, yet over questions such as the Falklands, Grenada and the nuclear defence of Europe the two clashed repeatedly. The same has happened over Cyprus, Suez and, more recently, Libya. And that is to take just the big questions and leave aside matters like our current dispute over abuse of diplomatic immunity.Yet Mr Trump’s is not an internationalist administration to say the least. The slogan of isolationists is America first, not “Britain first” or “Up the Anglosphere”. He wants to Make America Great Again, not preserve the great in Great Britain.Barack Obama was giving a hardheaded description of where American interests lie. It would be naive to imagine that American foreign policy will ever be based on anything else.daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk
Lucille Grant ● 2590d4 Comments ● 2589d