This is a moment when America’s closest security partner badly needs American help. In 2016, 51.9 percent of the British public voted to quit the European Union. The leaders of the “Leave” campaign assured voters that the U.K. would easily and speedily negotiate a favorable new relationship with the truncated EU. They promised, too, that a post-EU Britain would negotiate new trade pacts with the United States and Canada. In the words of the Vote Leave campaign’s manifesto: [...]
Every U.S. president from Dwight Eisenhower to Barack Obama favored an integrated European economy with Britain on the inside. President Trump favored Brexit in 2016. Having gotten his wish, he has turned his back on his Brexiteer friends. The Leave campaign imagined that Brexit Britain would seamlessly transition from the EU to a new Anglosphere trading future. Instead, negotiations with the United States have barely begun—no surprise in this chaotic administration. (The chief trade negotiator for agriculture did not even take office until March 1.)
As Thomas Wright noted in Politico, rather than negotiate a U.S.–U.K. free trade pact, Trump has hit Britain with bogus national-security tariffs on steel and aluminum. His administration offered the U.K. an open-skies agreement on passenger aviation inferior to what the U.K. had enjoyed as a member of the EU, and is dropping broad hints that Britain may have to dismantle important elements of its cherished National Health Service as part of any future U.S.–U.K. trade deal.
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