Does Joe Biden’s election victory change the dynamic of Brexit? John Ryan claims that the ‘Global Britain’ vision is about to collide with Brexit realities.
President-elect Joe Biden selected the UK among his first international contacts. The focus of the discussion was a reminder to prime minister Boris Johnson that the incoming US administration will closely follow the Brexit negotiations and the possible impact on the peace process in Northern Ireland. Even before the election result, many US officials had expressed their commitment to the Good Friday Agreement, and directly linking it to trade negotiations with the UK. With a Biden administration, the UK government may need to rethink its Brexit stance if it wants to pursue its ‘Global Britain’ vision.
Commitment to the Irish peace process in the US is bipartisan and in the context of Brexit well publicised. President Donald Trump’s special envoy to Northern Ireland, Mick Mulvaney, warned against creating a “hard border by accident” on the island of Ireland. In response to the Internal Market Bill introduced by Boris Johnson’s government, Mulvaney went a step further, saying in an interview with the Financial Times: “The Trump administration, State Department and the US Congress would all be aligned in the desire to see the Good Friday Agreement (Belfast Agreement) preserved to see the lack of a border maintained”.
Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives, has stated “The Good Friday Agreement is the bedrock of peace in Northern Ireland. If the UK violates its international agreements and Brexit undermines the Good Friday accord, there will be absolutely no chance of a US-UK trade agreement passing the Congress”.
A memo published by Joe Biden’s campaign in late October outlined the Democratic candidate’s view on Ireland and Irish-America. It said if elected, Biden would ‘support active US engagement to advance the Northern Ireland peace process’ and ensure there was ‘no US-UK trade deal if the implementation of Brexit imperils the Good Friday Agreement’.
Many UK experts on UK-US relations have been busy saying how important the UK is to the US which reflects on the insular view the Johnson government has on the so-called special relationship between the UK and the US. Special that relationship may be, but it is not the only one and one that has slipped in the pecking order. Those same experts have been deficient in their understanding of the EU and Irish negotiation objectives in the process of trying to make a post-Brexit trade deal happen.
Now Biden has won the US presidential race Johnson’s relationship with President Donald Trump will hinder his efforts to form close contact with the incoming administration. Forget about the ill-informed commentary in the British media about a US-UK trade agreement. Boris Johnson’s relationship with Trump, who backed Brexit and calls his British counterpart “Britain Trump”, is much closer. Downing Street was hoping the goodwill between the two populist leaders would help smooth the path of a trade deal, London’s top priority when it comes to its relations with Washington.
In 2016 Johnson was accused of dog-whistle racism for suggesting President Barack Obama’s attitude to Britain might be based on his “part-Kenyan” heritage and “ancestral dislike of the British empire”. In a widely criticised column for The Sun in 2016, the then-mayor of London recounted a story about a bust of former prime minister Winston Churchill purportedly being removed from the White House Oval Office. Tommy Vietor, a former communication advisor in Obama’s team, replied to Johnson’s congratulatory tweet: “We will never forget your racist comments about Obama and slavish devotion to Trump.” Under Johnson, the so-called special relationship which is more special for the UK than for the US will probably drift to lack of relevance or irrelevance. Not to say that the UK does not have utility for the US, for example, its membership of the UN security council, military and intelligence capabilities are important assets.
President-elect Biden associates Boris Johnson with Donald Trump. After last year’s general election, he described the UK prime minister as “a physical and emotional clone” of Trump. Biden also knows about foreign policy, not just because he was Vice President for eight years but because he chaired the US senate foreign policy committee for years. The so-called Special Relationship has lost its relevance to the US. No doubt the UK is an important partner, but the relationship was somewhat more relevant under the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and George W Bush and Tony Blair.
A Biden presidency is likely to follow the lead of Barack Obama in making Berlin his primary relationship in Europe. German chancellor Angela Merkel and Merkel’s successor and France’s President Emmanuel Macron will be the main interest in a Biden White House. And then there is Ireland. If the UK leaves the EU without a deal, or with a deal that US politicians believe undermines the Good Friday Agreement, the peace deal that settled three decades of sectarian violence in Ireland, the relationship will come under further strain. Biden, who is proud of his Irish roots, has warned publicly he would make a trade deal contingent on respecting the Northern Irish peace plan. The US Congress has already made clear that they will veto any trade agreement they believe threatens the peace deal.
If the UK government during the final weeks of 2020 negotiate a deal with the EU, which preserves an open border on the island of Ireland, they will have the support of the new US administration. If Boris Johnson fails to conclude an agreement on the future relationship between the UK and the EU, and in those circumstances seeks to row back on the commitments already made in the Withdrawal Agreement, they will face hostility from Washington after 20 January 2021. It would then subsequently not be possible for them to secure a free-trade deal of any kind with the US unless they are willing to make concessions on the question of the Irish border.
So far Downing Street insists that it has no intention of backing down from its Internal Market Bill and the clauses that are not only in breach of international law but that threaten the fragile peace on the island of Ireland. Behind the scenes though, there are signs that some Conservative politicians are getting worried and may look for a government rethink. The ‘Global Britain’ vision is about to collide with Brexit realities. Boris Johnson has so far chosen to ignore the implications of Brexit on Northern Ireland. With the election of Joe Biden to the US presidency, it is becoming ever more apparent that the repercussions of Johnson’s Brexit stance will go much further than Brussels, Dublin and Belfast.
This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of LSE Brexit, nor of the London School of Economics. Image: Müller / MSC (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Germany license.)
Utter bunkum and old regurgitated news. The UK will be independent of the EU and find a suitable NI protocol. Scaremongering gutter press hack.
Any “NI protocol” is going to have to have the consent of the people of Ireland, both here in the country and up in the six counties. Although given demographics (ie the simple fact that Nationalists are already a majority of the voting population), that may become moot as the impetus for a border poll becomes undeniable, even to a blind ignoramus like BoJo.
In view of the latest news from the USA its very
likely Biden and some of his administration will soon be in jail and Donald Trump re elected in January 2021. So the damaclese sword hanging over Downing St will be put back in its scabbard and a deal will be done with the existing administration. Bidens part in the Global Reset has suffered a severe blow and the new world order will now have to rethink its strategy going forward. Good news for the UK and the rest of the world. We still need to be ever vigilent as the Globalists reset their own clocks.
.
N
Here is you () ——————————————————-> (here is reality).
Frankly you’re not inhabiting a mental landscape in which reality has even a single iota of existence. Everything you’ve just typed up is either a lie or physically impossible.
Oh and PS, there was only one criminal running for President in 2020 and he was the Illegal Occupant of the White House for the last four years, not President Joe Biden.
Prof. Ryan repeats a wearyingly familiar Remainer trope, that the attitudes and policies of the EU are beyond question. Like a medieval papacy, or an early modern monarchy in the era of the Divine Right of Kings, the EU can do no wrong. So it follows that Britain is entirely in the wrong. In his piece, does Prof. Ryan utter so much a breath of criticism of the EU? He does not.
This theocratic approach is not only unpersuasive, it produces a form of myopia. “A Biden presidency is likely to follow the lead of Barack Obama in making Berlin his primary relationship in Europe.” asserts Prof. Ryan, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. Well, good luck to President Biden in trying to get any change at all out of the Germans (https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-joe-biden-angela-merkel-us-germany-transatlantic-relationship/). Obama got precisely nowhere.
“Article 184 of the Withdrawal Agreement required that the EU negotiate a satisfactory future relationship that respects UK sovereignty using good faith and best endeavours, to be encapsulated in a comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (FTA). There is a strong argument to be made that the EU has failed to discharge this duty, committing a material breach of the Agreement.
First, EU officials made representations that they would offer the UK an FTA as good or better than that in place with Canada, only to later renege. ……….”
https://www.politeia.co.uk/its-the-eu-not-the-uk-which-is-arguably-breaching-its-legal-obligations-under-the-withdrawal-agreement-by-professor-david-collins/
TJ: “First, EU officials made representations that they would offer the UK an FTA as good or better than that in place with Canada, only to later renege”
So this argument depends on two claims, both of which must be true for it to be valid.
Claim 1. The EU promised the UK a CETA-style deal, with level-playing provisions not more onerous than those in CETA.
Claim 2. Because the EU is unwilling to offer a CETA-style deal now, this constitutes a “material breach” under Article 60 of the Vienna convention, entitling the UK to terminate the Withdrawal Agreement.
I think both claims are highly dubious, and I’ll take them one after another. Claim 1 seems to be largely based on the following FT story, from 2017. https://www.ft.com/content/30705bfc-e5a6-11e7-97e2-916d4fbac0da . It does not say that the EU was going to offer a CETA-style deal, but that there was a “fallback plan considered by Brexit negotiators” to offer such a deal in certain circumstances in the summer of 2018.
Additionally I found the following story from the Express. https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1247019/brexit-news-eu-latest-free-trade-talks-canada-style-deal-negotiating-mandate-spt . It says “in 2019, former EU Council President Donald Tusk did claim that “from the very beginning, the EU offer has been not just a Canada deal, but a Canada+++ deal, much further-reaching on trade, on internal security and on foreign policy cooperation”. But it goes on to say “However, it is not clear whether the former EU Council President also wanted the UK to sign up to “specific and effective” guarantees.”. So there’s no indication that Donald Tusk in any way intended to commit the EU to offer a CETA style deal. The +++ implies additional obligations on both sides.
To consider Claim 2, we can refer to the Vienna convention itself. https://www.jus.uio.no/lm/un.law.of.treaties.convention.1969/60.html . To make claim 2 fly, you need the EU’s refusal to offer CETA to be “the violation of a provision essential to the accomplishment of the object or purpose of the treaty”. What provision is there in the Withdrawal Agreement is being violated by the EU? There is certainly no provision to offer a CETA-style deal.
The basis of Professor Collin’s argument seems to be that he wants to smuggle into the Withdrawal Agreements certain statements or plans made by EU officials, as if they were an integral part of the agreement “essential to the accomplishment of the object or purpose of the treaty”. I don’t see any basis for this. In the case of the FT story, it is of course the case that the EU did not offer a CETA-style deal in summer 2018, so the FT story is completely irrelevant to the withdrawal agreement negotiated in autumn 2019. In the case of the Donald Tusk remarks, he is suggesting CETA with various +++ additions, but no indication what these +++ provisions are.
If when Professor Collins says “First, EU officials made representations that they would offer the UK an FTA as good or better than that in place with Canada” he means something else, I don’t know what it could be. Perhaps TJ can help.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/sites/beta-political/files/slide_presented_by_barnier_at_euco_15-12-2017.pdf
In any case, I don’t see how claiming existing fishing rights can be reconciled with negotiating in good faith.
My understanding is that the UK negotiating team took this slide along with them to the first meeting after the withdrawal agreement and said that on the basis of the slide they wanted a Canada deal. The EU have failed to engage ever since on the basis that the UK is nearer to the EU than Canada.
If the EU now won’t play ball then effectively they tricked the UK into signing the withdrawal agreement.
TJ, I looked at the slide. I don’t see how this can be taken in international law as committing the EU to anything.
“Article 184 of the Withdrawal Agreement required that the EU negotiate a satisfactory future relationship that RESPECTS UK SOVEREIGNTY USING GOOD FAITH AND BEST ENDEAVORS to be encapsulated in a comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (FTA).”
If Barnier’s slide doesn’t apply, how exactly are they proposing to address Article 184? Had they shown good faith under the article 184, the Internal Market Bill would have never arisen.
Did you look at the remarks on page 1 of that pdf-file?
It says quite clearly:
“This is only for presentational and information purposes. It is naturally without prejudice to discussions on the framework of the future relationship.”
Detlef,
Yes I did read the first page. I think any reasonable interpretation would be that the slide is a broad outline but individual details need to be discussed. The UK government didn’t expect that the broad outline would be ditched once discussions started.
Perhaps the text on page 1 should have said ‘This is purely for the purposes of conning the UK government into signing the Withdrawal Agreement once they sign up we will refute it in its entirely.’
Brilliant post. Pity the person you’re responding to doesn’t think reality is going to intrude on his dogmatic insularity.
Like many people with power over other people J. Biden is putting his personal preferences over those of many of his fellow countrymen and women. He will not be but I think he should be ashamed of POKING his nose into something that has nothing to to do with America.
He can ,so he will and whilst doing so probably not attempt to explain that violence is not needed on the island of Ireland when there is a Democratic process to go through. I think he would enjoy seeing a battle royal around the border and show his disdain for lawful authority as it appears from his parties involvement in the latest American election debicle.
He appears to me to be a deceitful person unworthy of being the President.
attitude of the e.u. i thinks that funny you lot choose to leave you don’t need to e.u . and now your moaning because the e.u is a bully and doesn’t give you want you want. remember you lot choose to leave with out ties. you made your bed. not be quiet and lie in it.
The uk will forge ahead with CANZUK our allies we should have never left.
The eu sees the usa as what they don’t like, and don’t want, and the EU is built to counter the USA.
Canada don’t want ye. That’s simply another delusion of the likes of Rees-Mogg who thinks it’s still 1840 and sending a gunboat will cower the natives enough they’ll sign away their very lives.
You’re going to get a short sharp shock, James come the new year when you realise that an England on its own has very little power in this world.
Ian Ogden: “He will not be but I think he should be ashamed of POKING his nose into something that has nothing to to do with America.” Surely Joe Biden has every right to poke his nose into the question of whether there should be a trade deal between the USA and UK?
The whole row appears to be about clauses in the Internal Market Bill which break international law. If the UK government presses ahead with these clauses, then of course that is in any case going to discourage other countries from doing future deals with the Johnson government, because they know that government cannot be trusted to keep its word.
I hope the UK government wil back down. At the moment it looks as if they will only get these clauses through by using the Parliament Act to override the House of Lords.
David McKee: “Well, good luck to President Biden in trying to get any change at all out of the Germans” I suppose it all depends what he wants. If the future President Biden wants to exert influence on the EU27, it surely would be a more productive use of his time to telephone Angela Merkel than Boris Johnson.
The article David McKee links to is interesting, but places undue weight on the importance of US service personnel to Germany. I live in German and I don’t think many Germans would be particularly worried if the service personnel were to leave tomorrow. The days when the Red Army was stationed a few miles away in East Germany are over, and whatever one thinks of Putin, no-one thinks it especially likely that he is going to invade Western Europe. I hope the stationing of the US service personnel in Germany is useful for both sides and that US service personnel also profit from the posting. If the US service chiefs decide that they could more profitably be stationed somewhere else, then that’s fine. But I do not think the US government will get any change of the German government by threatening this; Donald Rumsfeld tried that back in 2004 and didn’t get anywhere.
Right now I think the Bundeswehr are more worried about the US withdrawing almost half its forces from Afghanistan.
Herr Anon says, “If the future President Biden wants to exert influence on the EU27, it surely would be a more productive use of his time to telephone Angela Merkel than Boris Johnson.” Which is perfectly true. But the EU is not NATO. And the EU is not Europe (much as it would like to pretend that it is).
The United States (like all other nations) has different interests. If the Americans want to discuss trade, then the EU is the appropriate institution to approach; and Germany is important, as it is the dominant economic power in the EU. So a phone call to the Chancellery in Berlin makes sense. If he wants to talk about diplomacy, he will want to speak to the Germans, French and British. If he wants to talk about issues in the Security Council, he will want to speak to the French and British. If he wants to talk about defence and security, he will phone London first.
To me, one of the most striking things about the modern world is that Europe has, to all intents and purposes, disarmed. This is unprecedented. By contrast, Asia is armed to the teeth. Which is why the Indians are engaged on a naval arms race with the Chinese: they fear China will challenge Indian dominance of the Indian Ocean (https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/FP_20200615_chinas_indian_ocean_ambitions_white-1.pdf). The Indians can’t do it alone, they need allies. The Americans are there, but who in Europe has the capacity to help?
I mentioned that the EU is not Europe. I would claim that this was so, even before Brexit, as the EU does not include Russia. I have a question for Herr Anon. Is Russia part of Europe or not? If it is, was it a colossal mistake by the EU not to encourage Russia to join in the 1990s? Yeltsin’s government was certainly keen to apply to join in 1994. It was rebuffed: I would argue that Putin, and Putin’s anti-Western policies, were the predictable result of Russia’s rejection.
David McKee: “I have a question for Herr Anon. Is Russia part of Europe or not? If it is, was it a colossal mistake by the EU not to encourage Russia to join in the 1990s?” The honest answer would be “I don’t know”. But I think it probably was a mistake.
You are right to focus on the hugely complex overlapping power structures in Europe. Whom President Biden wants to call will depend very much on what he wants done.
“The Indians can’t do it alone, they need allies. The Americans are there, but who in Europe has the capacity to help?” Who indeed. The British abandoned the East of Suez policy with Harold Wilson, as no doubt you remember. If European nations are to become a power in the Indian ocean again, I suppose it would make sense for them to do it together, but not much chance of that! But even a united force of the UK, France and Germany would I think have a hard time resisting Chinese domination.
Thank you for your interesting answer, Herr Alias. (And I apologise for getting your name wrong earlier.)
You mention Wilson and the abandonment of ‘East of Suez’. This is usually, and wrongly, portrayed as an example of Britain’s economic weakness. In fact, by the 1960s, Britain had paid off the bulk of its war debt to the Americans. As a result, public spending rose sharply. The spending was directed at housing and the welfare state, not defence. This is what people wanted. There were no votes in ‘East of Suez’, any more than there were votes in maintaining the Empire. Even so, it was never entirely abandoned – hence Diego Garcia.
The point of navies are that they are are very visible and very mobile. Warships can travel anywhere on the world’s oceans, they can go on exercises with local allies, and they are impressive to look at. They are valuable diplomatic commodities, as well as being capable of projecting power. Admiral Tirpitz realised that, hence the drive for a strong German navy. The Chinese realise it too (https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/mahan-corbett-and-chinas-maritime-grand-strategy/).
To my eyes, you seem strangely unconcerned about Germany’s weakness relative to Russia – both in defence and energy security. The Americans are unhappy about Nord Stream 2, but Berlin does not care. Can you explain why?
@David McKee: “The Americans are unhappy about Nord Stream 2, but Berlin does not care.” I think Berlin does care, but is trying to get rid of all the old polluting coal-fired power stations and depends for this on Russian gas. It would be nice if Germany could run 100% on offshore wind-power but the Energiewende is hard work and they still haven’t built all the high-voltage cables they would need to get enough power from North to South Germany. But I’m not going to start Googling to verify all that, so don’t take me too seriously.
However I don’t see how resurrecting the spirit of Admiral Tirpitz and a couple of German aircraft carriers in the Indian ocean (or anywhere else) are going to help guarantee German power supplies. I also don’t know what the contingency plan is if Putin decides to stop selling gas, whether you can restart the coal-fired power stations in time or obtain gas or energy in other forms from other sources.
“I think Berlin does care, but is trying to get rid of all the old polluting coal-fired power stations”
I think that should read that Berlin is trying to compensate for their stupid decision to shut down nuclear power overnight in response to a tsunami catastrophe in Japan that had no relevance whatsoever to Germany.
It would have nice if in response to the Greek crisis the EU could have commissioned massive solar farms in Greece to provide electric power. It would have supported the Greek economy and (I am guessing) the cost of cables from Greece would have been cheaper than the cost of a pipeline. (Who ever pays for the pipeline or cable initially, it will eventually be charged to the consumer.)
It wasn’t a mistake to get Russia to join the EU in the 90’s and I can give you two reasons:
1. Russia never had any intention of joining the EU. Under Yeltsin and nakedly under Putain, Russia’s goal has been always to regain its empire in Eastern Europe. It’s been pretty much Russia’s default point of view regarding Europe since the time of Peter the Great.
2. Bringing in the other Eastern European countries so quickly has been a massive mistake, clearly and by far the biggest mistake the EU made in its history. Yes, provide a path to accession and give supports to the former Soviet Bloc, but take time allowing in new countries and make them stringently follow the accession rules. Give them the help and also give them the goal to become properly functioning democracies and then let them in. And frankly this mistake was at the behest of the UK, neither France nor Germany nor any of the other leading EU nations wanted the Eastern Europeans in so quickly (eventually, yes). And the UK was largely acting under US orders at the time, because the US wanted the likes of Poland and Hungary tied to NATO (which they saw EU membership as essential) and they also wanted a less unified and more squabbling EU (the US could see from the 80’s that a relatively unified Europe was going to be strategically independent of them).
“Global Britain is about to collide with Brexit realities”
… and the EU is about to collide with post-covid financial realities. Once they materialise, the US will be looking to the UK rather than the EU just as it did following the 2007 crisis.
“I think that should read that Berlin is trying to compensate for their stupid decision to shut down nuclear power overnight in response to a tsunami catastrophe in Japan that had no relevance whatsoever to Germany.”
If you get simple basics wrong, why do you assume somebody assumes you understand the nuances?
BTW: To argue in case of NG with nuclear power is stupid as stupid can be.
Future relations will be simple:
Need to have a EU voice with the UN, links between USA and France + all temporary members to the UN security council
Need to have a close economic cooperation with EU, links between USA and Germany
Need to speak with EU about military matters, links between USA and France (sole EU nuclear power, largest EU army)
Need to develop US economical interests in EU, links between Eire and USA,
UK chose to be outside, its choice. So it’s losing automatically influence. It will try to money its US seat and nuclear power to remain part of the European world. But UK will have lost some muscle from not being part of a powerful club.
We may think whatever we want but realpolitik comes first, with economic strength. It will be harder for an isolated country. Harder does not mean that UK will be a small country just that that it chose to lose influence with an important group of countries with which UK has so many links.