Incredible is the word for the news that the Obama administration has warned Britain against betting on American backing if it withdraws from the European Union. In all of President Obama’s leftism, there is little so myopic as this.
Yet that’s the news that broke over the weekend, and on Memorial Day, no less. It’s a day on which we remember the fallen in our wars. It’s hard think of any country that has stood faster with us — and vice versa — than Great Britain.
So if the British people were to decide, democratically, that their best interests lie in independence from the EU — a pseudo-democratic bureaucracy that fosters socialism and economic pain, in the name of uniting the continent — you’d think an American administration would leap at the chance to help. It ought to be a lead pipe cinch.
But a pro-Labor British paper was out with the news Monday that the Obama administration has been quietly warning British officials that if Britain leaves the EU, it will “exclude itself” from favorable American trade and investment agreements. A separate US deal with Britain, the Manchester Guardian reported, would be “very unlikely.”
This threat comes despite the fact that pressure for Britain to pull back from the EU is rising from the grass roots, with a surge in the United Kingdom Independence Party.
So much for America and Britain having a “special relationship.”
The phrase “special relationship” has been in use for more than a century. It connotes the bonds of language and culture — and of shared concepts of liberty — that survived the American Revolution and the War of 1812.
Winston Churchill made the phrase famous, using it late in World War II and then in the “Iron Curtain Speech,” in which he warned that an Iron Curtain had fallen over Europe, with the Communists on one side and the Free World on the other.
He warned that neither efforts to prevent war nor the rise of world organizations would succeed without the “fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples.” That meant, he said, “a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and the Empire and the United States.”
The special relationship obtained for generations, nursed in varying degrees by every president since Dwight Eisenhower, with particularly glorious results under President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margeret Thatcher.
Thatcher also understood the dangers of what was being cooked up in the European Union, which now numbers 27 nations. “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels,” she declared in what became known as the Bruges speech, after the Belgian city where she delivered it.
Her concerns were grasped on this side of the Atlantic up through the presidency of George W. Bush.
But President Obama has changed all that. He cleared the bust of Churchill out of the Oval Office, while denying the gesture was significant.
Things got so bad that a number of members of the British parliament have called on the British foreign office to stop using the phrase “special relationship.” The latest warnings from Washington spell more serious trouble.
Prime Minister David Cameron has promised a national referendum on the question of leaving the European Union, which aims to counterbalance America. Some commentators are calling a Brexit — British exit — a real possibility. If so, the right way to look at it is as an opportunity for the United States.
It would be the chance to build an alliance based not so much on a common language and blood but on shared ideas of liberty. These are the classically liberal ideas of limited government and free markets that were developed by such thinkers at John Locke and Adam Smith.
These are ideas away from which Europe is moving, but they are the ideas on which any sustained recovery will be built. Why in the world is an American administration saying that if the British move away from Europe and toward these ideas America will rebuff them?