Barack Obama’s brief sojourn in London this week, though not a formal state visit, will doubtless be accompanied by the usual ceremonial honours. The US president will dine with the Queen at Windsor Castle to mark her 90th birthday. He will hold talks with David Cameron at Downing Street. And the White House says Obama will thank Britain for its “stalwart partnership” during his presidency, thereby paying ritual obeisance to the time-honoured, sometimes over-hyped “special relationship”. Yet beyond this deeply familiar point, the visit is expected to enter new and dangerous territory. Obama intends to state clearly and publicly his strongly held view that the British people should vote to remain in the EU in the referendum in June.
Obama’s intervention in this increasingly febrile and delicately balanced national debate is potentially explosive. The Vote Leave campaign, anointed last week as the Brexiters’ standard bearer, will likely react with fury, as will the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative party. Rightwing, anti-EU newspapers, many of which never much liked the liberal-minded Obama in the first place, can be expected to vent their spleen, too. Opponents of continued EU membership have been getting their retaliation in first. Rory Broomfield of Better Off Out told the Washington Times that Obama’s stance was “sort of 1776 in reverse”.
The White House already appears on the defensive. A senior official said the president “will respect the sovereignty of the UK and the right of the British people to make that determination” on EU membership. But that said, Obama looks set to make his feelings known and hand out some free advice. In fact, he already has. Speaking in a BBC interview last year, he warned Britain would lose influence if it left the EU, while its membership “made the world safer and more prosperous”. He continued: “Having the UK in the EU gives us much greater confidence about the strength of the transatlantic union and is part of the cornerstone of the institutions built after [the Second World War].”
Obama’s de facto backing for the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign will be welcomed by Cameron and his supporters. But the president’s refreshing straight talk, or unwarranted importunity, depending on your perspective, is a double-edged sword. For every voter impressed by Obama’s arguments, there may be another who resents his involvement. When it comes to intervening in domestic British politics, Obama has got serious form. He was frank in 2014 in proclaiming that Scots would be better off voting to stay within a “stronger” UK. He and his top officials brought extraordinary pressure to bear on Cameron and the chancellor, George Osborne, when they appeared poised to cut Britain’s Nato contribution to below 2% of GDP. Their disapproval of leftwing Labour ideas on abolishing Trident is only too evident.
Like any president, Obama has a job to do, namely, asserting, protecting and advancing American interests at home and abroad. Historically, this includes, as a high priority, assuring the peace, security, integrity and prosperity of the European continent. In the post-1945 period, the US has consistently preferred a united Europe to a divided one. In particular, it stood shoulder to shoulder with Britain in facing down the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It actively supported the post-1989 reunification of Germany, reintegration of eastern Europe and subsequent EU enlargement, all of which was British policy. And when things went wrong in Europe, as in Bosnia’s civil war in the 1990s, the US came back to help.
As a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report noted last year, Britain’s partnership role in maintaining European peace and unity while helping to project shared US security, political and free trade objectives in Europe, be it through the EU, Nato, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, one-off joint foreign policy initiatives (as with Iran), or through negotiations on the proposed Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, remains crucial. Britain is as close as Washington gets to having an EU proxy – and for the US, it is invaluable.
“Envisioning an EU without the UK, many [American] analysts observe that British participation is widely regarded as essential for efforts to develop more robust EU foreign and defence policies. Analysts also assert that the departure of the UK could change the economic character of the EU because the UK generally acts as a leading voice for economic liberalism in EU debates about trade and the single market,” the CRS report said. Together, the EU and the US have the largest bilateral trade and investment relationship in the world, roughly 31% of world trade and over 49% of world GDP. Why on earth would the US want to risk this being disrupted? For Obama, it is a no-brainer.
Paradoxically, however, Obama in office has been unusually neglectful, and occasionally downright disrespectful, of the EU and the European project he is now so intent on praising. Early on, Obama made clear his geo-strategic priority was Asia. On the expanding threat to Europe posed by Russia’s adventurism in Ukraine and elsewhere, Obama has done little in practice. On Syria and associated, ramifying Europe-wide problems, Obama has been mostly absent without leave.
Despite the promise of a new beginning in his 2009 Cairo speech, Obama eventually gave up on Israel-Palestine peace. Mounting problems in post-Gaddafi Libya are blamed on “free rider” European leaders, not least a “distracted “Cameron. Meanwhile, Europe’s mishandling of the eurozone crisis, Greek austerity and the existential threat posed by unchecked immigration are seen not as reasons to extend a helping hand but, rather, as a smug vindication of American separateness.
Yet, such differences and disappointments aside, Obama deserves to be listened to on the question of Britain’s EU future. The values and beliefs binding the US to Britain, and Britain to Europe, are far stronger than the stresses that divide us. The common challenges we face – encroaching authoritarianism, terrorism, global economic dislocation, financial skulduggery, climate change, poverty and mass migration – are issues that only the western powers, united and acting together, have a hope of managing effectively. And Obama, as US president, leads that western coalition, for all its failings, the most enlightened and benign in modern history. This referendum decision cannot, at bottom, be a narrow matter of pride or even national sovereignty. It is a matter of practical common sense and of wider, shared responsibilities.
