Britain should not expect America to welcome it with open arms
By LEXINGTON | WASHINGTON, DC
BY INSTINCT Americans cheer declarations of independence, especially when those going it alone claim to be throwing off the shackles of foreign tyranny. A certain note of piquant irony may intrude when the revolutionaries hail from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. But no matter: liberty is liberty, and conservative Americans in particular have reacted warmly to the news of the Brexit vote, praising what they hail as an act of understandable pluck, inspired by a familiar concern for national sovereignty.
Figures from several different wings of the American Right have claimed to recognise their specific brand of politics in the vote to leave the European Union. Donald Trump, a man always quick to detect his decisive influence on events, clattered from the skies in a helicopter to visit a Scottish golf course that he has been tarting up on June 24th, and informed the people of Scotland, Britain, America and the world that the referendum result of the night before echoed and vindicated his philosophy of rejecting “rule by the global elite”. “The British people had voted to reassert control over their own politics, borders and economy,” he said in a statement, adding: “I hope America is watching.” Scots being a hard-to-please bunch, Mr Trump was greeted with a certain amount of online churlishness, as citizens of Scotland pointed out on social media that they had mostly voted to Remain (one Scot on Twitter referred to the presumptive presidential nominee as a “clueless numpty“).
Paul Ryan, who as Speaker of the House of Representatives is the most senior elected Republican in America, listened to the cries of “freedom” from 17m Britons and heard an echo of his brand of conservative politics, saying that Americans “clearly understand the thinking” that values sovereignty, self-determination and limited government (Mr Ryan’s list of valued thinking also praised “governing by consensus”, which arguably better describes the Union out of which Britain is now stomping).
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a strict constitutional conservative who came second in his party’s 2016 presidential primary with a platform heavy on law-and-order and demands to secure America’s borders, heard in Brexit a “wake-up call for internationalist bureaucrats from Brussels to Washington, DC” and urged America to learn from the referendum and “attend to the issues of security, immigration and economic autonomy that drove this historic vote.”
The welcome was detectably more tepid on the Democratic side, with President Barack Obama saying in a statement that America respected the British decision, that the special relationship was “enduring” and British membership of NATO remains a “vital cornerstone” of American foreign, security and economic policy. But for readers of tea leaves, there was a coded warning as the statement moved smartly on to the importance of America’s relationship with the European Union, before finally calling the EU and Britain both “indispensable” partners.
Congressional Democrats were cooler still. Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the House Minority Whip, essentially scolded Brexit voters, saying: “This act of self-inflicted instability was fueled, in no small part, by the anti-immigrant, isolationist populism we’re seeing on the rise throughout the world and even here at home.”
American reactions always matter to the British. But transatlantic views of Brexit are especially important for Thatcherite Conservative members of the Leave camp, who made a series of bold promises about how the British would be welcomed into the embrace of an Anglo-Saxon alliance of countries that speak English, take their democratic cues from the Magna Carta, their views of free trade from Adam Smith and would generally rush to offer an attractive free trade agreement to the post-EU Britain in the twinkling of an eye.
These romantic nation-state liberals—figures such as Boris Johnson, the tousle-headed, American-born former mayor of London, his Tory colleague Michael Gove and numerous pundits and columnists—were duly incensed when Mr Obama visited Britain in April and noted, to paraphrase the president, that Brexiteers had been busy writing cheques on America’s bank account, and that British voters might like to ask how exactly those promises were to be cashed.
While it is fair to say that at some point down the line there might be a British-American trade agreement, Mr Obama said, his country was focused for the moment on passing deals with large blocks, notably the EU, so that Britain would be “at the back of the queue”.
The Brexiteers’ response was noisy scorn, as they hastened to assure voters that they knew better than Mr Obama about America’s self-interest, or that he was simply lying at the suggestion of his friend David Cameron. There was a special mini-conspiracy theory about the president’s use of the British word “queue”, rather than the American “back of the line”. Press commentators and politicians thundered, to the accompaniment of Lilliputian toots of self-regard, that the American leader was clearly reading from a London-drafted script.
Boris Johnson wrote a column for the Sun tabloid, accusing Mr Obama of breathtaking hypocrisy for suggesting that British voters should accept a pooling of their national sovereignty in the EU of a sort that Americans would never tolerate. He noted that a bust of Winston Churchill had been moved from the Oval Office by Mr Obama when he took office, adding—with Trumpian deflection—that “some said” (though not Mr Johnson, obviously) that this was a snub by a “part-Kenyan” president with an “ancestral dislike of the British empire.”
Dominic Raab, a Tory justice minister campaigning for Leave, declared his belief that Britons would not be “blackmailed by anyone, let alone a lame duck US president on his way out.” Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, asserted that Mr Obama did not understand the difference between the EU and NATO, that he would be out of office soon after a Brexit vote and that “trade deals are of course in both countries’ interest.”
So will those Brexiteers’ cheques now be swiftly and easily cashed? The question is somewhat similar to the larger question of Britain’s future trade relations with the EU. The great claim by Brexiteers is that because Britain buys more from Europe than vice versa, economic rationality means that a future British government will easily secure a deal that avoids almost all barriers to trade while at the same time allowing British firms to avoid costly and onerous EU regulations and permits British labour markets to be sealed to EU workers at will. If some Europeans have the bad manners to cut up rough, Brexiteers assert, then big boys such as the German car-makers will soon step in and impose order, as they wish to carry on selling BMWs and Volkswagens to British motorists.
This claim suffers from a couple of problems, starting with relative scale. To simplify and exaggerate, your blogger buys more from Safeways than Safeways buys from him, and yet does not set terms and prices in that trading relationship. Britain is a hefty country by European standards, to be sure, but some 45% of its exports go to the rest of Europe, while about 7% of other EU countries’ total exports are bought by Britain.
The larger problem is politics. Brexiteers are never happier than when thundering about their own country’s proud sovereignty, their desire to see British interests put first, and the noble willingness of a democratic people to resist bullying by experts and big businessmen and other bullies when their dignity and democratic rights are at stake.
But here is the hitch. Those same Brexiteers are startlingly incurious about what foreigners think and feel, and disdainfully sure that they either love Britain enough to do as requested (cf the cheques written on America’s account) or will submit to bullying by big boys (cf those predictions that BMW will tell Europeans what to do).
The double-standards are striking. Brexiteers take their own political sensitivities exceedingly seriously, but fail to remember that America and other EU nations are democracies, too, with governments that have to answer to their own angry, populist electorates.
To focus on America, it is possible to think that removing all remaining trade barriers with Britain is a splendid idea, and to believe—as Mr Obama suggested—that asking for a new bilateral trade deal now shows quite shockingly bad timing. If Brexiteers think that this is just a problem of having a Democrat in the White House, let them answer these questions. Do they think that a newly-elected President Trump would be willing to put a hold on building a wall with Mexico and slapping tariffs on China to spend political capital and energy on a new pact promoting free trade with Britain? If Mr Ryan is still Speaker in January or Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is still Republican leader in the Senate, do they imagine that their hearts would soar at being asked, as a first order of business, to get a free trade pact through the next Congress? And if Democrats are in charge in Congress, do Brexiteers think it would be any different?
In their navel-gazing parochialism, Brexiteers seem not to have considered that the same populist forces sweeping them to victory in their EU referendum are also sweeping every other Western democracy. It is possible to be a tea-drinking, Downton Abbey-watching senator and not have any desire to offend voters back home by doing Britain a favour on trade. All politics is domestic. Brexiteers are supposed to know that.
