U.S. trade negotiations with the United Kingdom will face bipartisan opposition if British Prime Minister Boris Johnson proceeds with a Brexit maneuver that American lawmakers fear could lead to a renewal of violence in Northern Ireland.
“The United States Congress will not support any free trade agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom if the United Kingdom fails to preserve the gains of the Good Friday Agreement and broader peace process,” House Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel, a Democrat from New York, wrote Tuesday, referring to the 1998 deal that largely ended the Irish sectarian conflict. “If these reported plans were to go forward, it would be difficult to see how these conditions could be met.”
Brexit advocates are counting on a free trade agreement with the U.S. But the message from Engel raises the stakes of a legislative debate in London, where Johnson is trying to change the terms of the divorce agreement from the European Union, which was finalized earlier this year after months of bitter negotiations.
“We therefore urge you to abandon any and all legally questionable and unfair efforts to flout the Northern Ireland protocol of the Withdrawal Agreement and look to ensure that Brexit negotiations do not undermine the decades of progress to bring peace to Northern Ireland and future options for the bilateral relationship between our two countries,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter, which was also signed by House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat.
The controversy centers on how to manage trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland in light of the fact that Northern Ireland shares a land border with the Republic of Ireland, a member of the EU. The fact that the Irish border is “essentially invisible” has been one of the keys to peace.
But it underpins a dilemma for Brexit negotiators: The U.K. doesn’t want to be forced to comply with EU economic regulations, while the EU doesn’t want products that fail to comply with its rules passing from Northern Ireland to Ireland without the approval of EU inspectors.
The withdrawal treaty governing Brexit squared that circle by planning to leave Northern Ireland within the EU’s single market, under terms that still have to be negotiated. Johnson’s team is trying to pass legislation that would give him the power to override that aspect of the agreement if the talks go badly, even while admitting that doing so would “break international law in a very specific and limited way.”
That effort has drawn criticism within Johnson’s own party and former British prime ministers while heightening the fear that Brexit would result in a so-called “hard border” dividing Ireland and Northern Ireland after all.
“It’s not just about trade, it’s much more fundamental than that,” Irish nationalist politician Colum Eastwood told local press. “We are not going backwards despite what this government or anyone else in this house tries to drag us back. We are refusing to a place that caused so much hurt and so much pain.”
Engel and Neal — along with Massachusetts Rep. Bill Keating, a Democrat, and New York Republican Rep. Pete King — echoed those sentiments in their letter, warning Johnson that his plan could have “disastrous consequences” for peace on the island.
“We appreciate the challenges that your country faces as it stares down the October 15th deadline for a negotiated agreement – but an Ireland divided by a hard border risks inflaming old tensions that very much still fester today and undoing decades of progress that the United States, Republic of Ireland, and United Kingdom achieved together,” they wrote.
