Brexit: don’t expect all the world to come knocking at the door

“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 EU — 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 Barack Obama’s intervention in the 2016 European ­referendum. Remainers look on it as one of their few good days.

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.

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?

While the former US 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 US 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 Obama’s position on Brexit was the standard American one, the one it has held since World War II.

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 Britain 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.

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 Johnson and encouraging of the idea that a trade deal might be struck quite quickly, ushering in a new phase of the US-UK partnership.

Trump is head of a political movement that has always been sympathetic to Britain as a military ally and a fellow advocate of free markets.

Yet to treat this as the reliable foundation of a deeper future partnership is an error.

To start with the simplest point, Trump may not be President for much longer. 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Obama was giving a hard-headed description of where American interests lie. It would be naive to imagine that American foreign policy will ever be based on anything else.

The Times