Last week Barack Obama took it upon himself urge the British people, between his lunch with the queen at Windsor Castle and his dinner with Princes William and Harry at Kensington Palace, to vote to remain rather than leave in the June 23 referendum on whether the United Kingdom should remain in the European Union.
What could justify such an intervention in the domestic politics of a friendly ally? American presidents have not taken to counseling voters in Britain — or in France, in Japan, in Poland, or wherever voters are free — on which party to vote for or whom to choose as head of government, though in some cases they have had definite and not very convincingly disguised preferences. But an American president must retain the option of dealing with new leaders of different parties, as comfortable as it may have become to deal with familiar incumbents.
In my Washington Examiner column last month on this subject, I noted that Obama is not unique among American presidents for cheering on the European Union and its promise, made in its founding document in 1957, of an “ever closer union.” Presidents have instinctively favored this project, first on the grounds that it’s against American interests to have differences between Germany and France start another world war and, second, out of a sentimental attachment for unions made up of separate states, as our nation was a quarter of a millennium ago.
I argued that both reasons were beside the point today. It’s been a long time since there was any realistic prospect that differences between Germany and France (or between any two members of the European Union) would lead to a world war, as in 1914 and 1939. And the “ever closer union” promoted by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels has not succeeded in spawning a sense of common European nationality in any way analogous to that of the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. So it should be a matter of indifference, or nearly that, to us whether Britain or any other single nation stays in or gets out of the European Union.
But not to Barack Obama. He not only argued in a public speech and in an opinion article in the Telegraph that Britons should vote to remain, he also said that a Britain that voted to leave would, when it came to trade agreements with the United States, have to go to “the back of the queue.” He even bothered to learn the right British argot.
This was a gratuitous slam at a longstanding ally. But, as we know from Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic article based on his numerous interviews of the president, Obama has contempt for allies of the United States, with perhaps special venom for allies who can be described as longstanding.
It’s disgraceful to see a president of the United States threatening to punish a longstanding ally if its people vote contrary to his wishes. It’s even more disgraceful in that Obama, as president for only the next nine months, will not be in a position to deliver on his threat anyway. For that reveals his statement as part bullying, part bilgewater. This is the president who was going to restore America’s reputation for sensitive understanding of other nations and their leaders?
