After the vote to
leave the EU, and following the election of Donald Trump, a former White House adviser told me: “If any other Republican president were in office, they would say, ‘We don’t agree with Brexit, but you’re our strongest ally. You can have a trade deal with us, and on terms you’ll find helpful’.” But Trump’s was no normal presidency. “Nobody but Trump would have been pro-Brexit,” my friend said. “But if you want a trade deal he will try to screw you with your pants still on.”
This was just one reason why a trade agreement with America was neither likely nor desirable. Unusually, official figures show Britain enjoys a trade surplus with America, and Trump would have seen a trade deal as a moment to squeeze us hard. There was also the role of Congress in negotiations – never likely to be helpful – and controversies in Britain about American farming methods.
Then there was the election of Joe Biden, who visits
Northern Ireland and the Republic this week. President Biden has a history of taking strident, hostile and ignorant positions against British interests. As a senator in the 1980s, he campaigned to stop a change in American extradition law favoured by President Reagan, which would have removed “political exemption” clauses and allowed IRA terror suspects in the States to be sent to Britain for trial.
In a letter regarding the case of an IRA gunman, who had been involved in a shoot-out that left a British soldier dead, and who had later kidnapped a prison officer and shot his way out of jail, Biden wrote, “it is far preferable to allow occasional judicial mistakes than to codify an approach that would have, for example, required the US to send Indian dissidents in the 1940s to England to stand trial”.
This was absurd for many obvious reasons, not least that Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom by the democratic consent of its people. Yet Biden’s statement was neither a one-off slip nor a product of its time. In Israel last year, he said: “The background of my family is Irish-American, and we have a long history not unlike the Palestinian people, with Great Britain and their attitude toward Irish Catholics over the years.”
It was no surprise, then, that Biden took an antagonistic attitude towards Britain throughout the Brexit negotiations. He repeatedly elided the
Good Friday Agreement, which says nothing about borders, with an insistence that there could be no border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. He even instructed his most senior diplomat in London to lodge a “demarche” – a formal diplomatic protest – over British resistance to EU checks on goods travelling between Northern Ireland and mainland Britain.
Predictably, Biden showed little concern for the Good Friday Agreement once it became clear that the Northern Ireland Protocol endangered the peace process because of the problems it presented to unionists. For some Democrats such partisanship was about the relationship – as they perceived it at least – between Brexit and the populist wave that elected Donald Trump. But for others – including Biden himself – it is also because they are partisan on the future of Northern Ireland itself. In November, Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, offered Sinn Fein his support for “full Irish unity”.
If this sounds not very much like the conduct of an important ally, that is because too many in Britain have a naïve view of our alliance with America. We are two different countries with distinct cultures and interests. As two liberal democracies with common enemies, those interests often coincide – but not always. This should be obvious, yet many are taken in by a common language, familiarity with American culture, and the cost-free rhetoric of
the so-called “special relationship”. With Brexit, when Britain expected support from its cherished ally, none arrived.
This is – of course – not to say that there is no value in the alliance, which rests on deep security co-operation. Our two countries share intelligence material in a way that is incomparable anywhere else in the world. Britain, along with Canada and Australia, is part of America’s statutory National Technology and Industrial Base. And as the Aukus treaty shows, there is still scope for military and industrial co-operation to deepen further.
All this demonstrates that the alliance has foundations that survive the madness of a Trump or the frostiness of a Biden administration. And it tends to have a momentum of its own regardless of the chemistry shared by presidents and prime ministers. Just as threats from the past – from the Axis powers to the Soviet Union and Islamist terrorists – have brought the countries together, so, in all probability, will China and global threats that grow as Western power declines.
Yet we must accept that there is nuance and complexity in a relationship in which we start off with different cultural perspectives; view the world with our different interests in mind; judge what might be possible as countries of around 340 million people and 67 million people respectively; and elect governments and leaders with different personalities and outlooks.
Politicians like to talk about relations between countries as friendships and enduring partnerships, but then political language is by nature often hyperbolic, hypocritical and designed to cover up contradiction and controversy. President Biden will likely once again reveal his partisan support for Irish nationalism this week, and perhaps insult unionists and the British as he does so. But if so, we should not care.
A grown-up assessment of the alliance with America must be realistic. There are trade-offs in any international relationship, and there is plenty we gain from our alliance. But that does not mean we must always be craven or compliant.
Sooner or later Biden will leave office. He may be replaced by a friendlier president, but regardless, he will not be the last unfriendly face in the White House. Our job is to assess our interests – not to fawn embarrassingly about the “special relationship”, plead for a trade deal we do not need, or rush into every war America feels it needs to wage. In other words, we need to grow up, and do what is right for ourselves.
