President Obama loves the European Union. He believes the British people should too. And to anyone who might dissent from his view when the question of the U.K.’s EU membership is put to a national referendum on June 23, he has a threat: Vote to leave and he’ll upend the “special relationship” by sending the U.K. to the “back of the queue” in any future trade negotiations with the United States.
Delivered during a joint press conference in London with Prime Minister David Cameron, the president’s threat—the diplomatic equivalent of the Mafioso trope, “nice country you’ve got there, shame if someone were to wreck it for you”—wasn’t merely inappropriate and hypocritical, it was also wrong on substance and revealing of Obama’s ideology. With any luck, it will backfire.
Obama knew that his intervention would be contentious and so, as he’s fond of doing, took steps to preempt any criticism by denying in one breath what he was about to say in the next: “I’m not coming here to fix any votes. I’m not casting a vote myself. I’m offering my opinion. And in democracies, everybody should want more information, not less. And you shouldn’t be afraid to hear an argument being made. That’s not a threat. That should enhance debate.”
That’s particularly rich if you recall the Obama administration’s reaction last year when Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered his “own opinion” on the Iran deal to Congress. Netanyahu was of course denounced by the president for meddling in U.S. policy and White House aides were quoted as saying that Netanyahu had “spat in our face publicly.”
It’s also rich when you consider that the EU is a polity that no American who loves his country would ever countenance joining. The EU precludes Britain from conducting its own trade agreements or fully managing its own borders and immigration policies. Its unelected high court regularly strikes down rulings from the British supreme court; it imposes regulations on the economy that the elected Parliament is powerless to reject and collects about half a billion dollars from the British treasury each week. The net effect is to seriously erode British sovereignty. No wonder, then, that some 60 percent of Brits disapproved of Obama’s intervention, and polls even moved slightly in favor of a British exit in the days that followed it.
But what of the substance? The president made three basic arguments for why Britain would be better off voting to remain in the EU, each of them fatuous.
First, he claimed (threatened) that Britain’s economic relationship with America might suffer if it found itself outside of an EU that had secured the free trade agreement currently being negotiated with the United States. The “back of the queue” argument is one the Obama administration has been making for some time now. Last October, U.S. trade representative Michael Froman warned that should Britain leave the EU it would “be subject to the same tariffs—and other trade-related measures—as China or Brazil or India.”
And herein lies the absurdity of the president’s reasoning. It’s precisely because of Britain’s membership in the EU that the United States and the U.K. don’t presently have a free trade agreement. The EU effectively prevents member states from signing unilateral agreements and seeks instead to negotiate such deals on their behalf. And so rather than securing an agreement with the United States years ago, Britain has had to wait as the broader EU effort founders due to the protectionist demands of special national interests, like the French auto industry and Italian cheese-makers, among others.
Moreover, the implication that the world’s fifth-largest economy will suddenly be of less consequence to America if it leaves the EU is absurd. The U.K. is America’s largest trading partner within the EU. British companies employ some one million people in the United States. And the flows go both ways. America is Britain’s largest trade partner outside the EU. American companies employ approximately 1.3 million people in Britain.
It is an open secret in Washington that if Britain leaves, Obama’s successor, whomever it might be, would enter into direct negotiations with Britain on a free trade agreement. And so the president’s threat is an empty one: By the time any of this matters, he’ll be gone from office.
The second argument the president made was on national security grounds, arguing that “intelligence sharing and counterterrorism” efforts would be “far more effective” with Britain in Europe. No matter that Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, had demolished these arguments a few days earlier: “From a national security perspective,” he said, “the cost to Britain would be low.” Britain would in fact realize “two . . . important security gains”: Control over immigration and the ability to deport terrorists and terror suspects.
Britain’s armed forces minister, Penny Mordaunt, went further. In an op-ed directly rebutting the president’s remarks, she excoriated Obama’s “woeful ignorance of the practical reality of the EU’s impact on our security, and the interests of the U.K.” and went on to suggest that the president “must be unaware of the alarming weaknesses that allow Daesh terrorists to move unimpeded across Europe.”
For those who truly care about Britain’s ability to defend itself, it’s easy to see why this touched a nerve. When Britain joined the precursor to the EU in 1973, defense spending as a portion of GDP stood at 5.5 percent. Today it hovers around 2 percent. The Royal Navy is less than half the size it was 30 years ago and today possesses no aircraft carriers. Wherever you wish to place the cause of this decline, it seems self-evident that EU membership hasn’t encouraged a robust British defense policy in recent years.
The final argument offered by the president was that Britain should remain in the EU to exert leadership and influence. “The United States sees how your powerful voice in Europe . . . keeps the EU open, outward looking, and closely linked to its allies.” This line of reasoning might have made sense in the early days of the union when the body was comprised of a smaller number of countries. Today, however, Britain is one of 28 votes. Its influence on the body has declined apace. Since 1996, the U.K. has opposed 55 measures in the EU’s top body, the Council of Ministers. Its objections have been outvoted each and every time.
The other problem with the sane man in the asylum argument is that, left there long enough, he eventually and inevitably goes mad. A case in point: Prime Minister Cameron’s effete complicity in the president’s intervention. Watching him stand shoulder to shoulder with Obama and smiling blithely as the president blackmailed British citizens laid bare the extent to which the European project necessarily corrodes not just national sovereignty, but also national dignity.
Of course Obama’s case was never really about the merits. It’s about ideology. The referendum is not a choice between economic uncertainty and the status quo, as the president makes out. It’s a referendum on the EU’s aspirations, on what membership in the EU will mean for, and require of, Britain in 20 or 30 years.
Britain is really choosing between two competing sets of values for how to structure and govern society: between technocracy and liberal democracy; the centralization of power and its devolution; executive action and the ballot box; soft- and hard-power foreign policy; supra-nationalism and patriotism; between “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and the EU’s alternative, which guarantees such rights as affordable housing and free health care.
It is to these fundamental questions that Americans, particularly those of a conservative persuasion, should be paying close attention. And when framed in this way, the rationale for President Obama’s intervention becomes much clearer. The president doesn’t care that much about Britain. He cares about the ideology of a federal Europe. He believes that Britain’s continued membership of the EU is good because he believes the EU is good. He approves of history marching in the pan-European direction and away from national sovereignty. He recognizes that a vote to leave would rock the European project.
As Daniel Hannan, a British member of the European parliament, pointed out recently in the Washington Examiner: “The things that Obama likes about the EU—the judicial activism, the elevation of unelected officials over politicians, the soft foreign policy, the eco correctness, the social democracy, the supra-nationalism” are the touchstones of his own presidency. He is in a way America’s first European president.
Which ideas and values should triumph? The British will answer these question for themselves next month. And while the president has made clear where he stands, nonprogressive Americans have every reason to hope instead that Britain might muster the courage to stand athwart history yelling stop.
Joel Winton, formerly a Tikvah fellow at the Wall Street Journal, grew up in Britain and resides in New York.
