Today, Winston Churchill turns 142 and America ought to prepare a birthday present for the British prime minister. But what do you get the world leader who saved Western civilization from certain destruction? A bilateral trade agreement.
A trade treaty would be a winning step toward restoring what Churchill described once as “the alliance of the English-speaking peoples.” The foundation is already in place. We enjoy a shared language, law code and general free market ideology.
All President-elect Trump needs to do is wrap that all up and deliver a U.S.-U.K. trade deal next year. It’d be a belated gift to Churchill and an economic boon to both countries.
Always special but recently strained, the Anglo-American relationship has been overwrought by globalism on the world stage and elitism in the White House. Things got off to a rocky start when President Obama removed a bust of Churchill, which had been a gift from the British people, from the West Wing.
But that snub pales in comparison to the American progressives most recent lecture. Ahead of the U.K.’s vote to leave the European Union, the outgoing executive interjected, warning that the U.S. would place the U.K. at the “back of the queue” if it left the EU. Luckily, the old empire disregarded the advice from the head of its former colony.
And so far Brexit has proved a shot in the arm for the British economy. English consumer confidence is up and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development just bumped up its economic forecast for the island nation. The Paris-based OECD just predicted a 2.0 percent increase in growth for Britain.
A bilateral trade deal would bring Great Britain to the front of the line in the U.S. while allowing America to capitalize on that growth. As Dan Hannan, a conservative British MEP and Washington Examiner columnist, observed there’s no downside to joining “the largest and the fifth-largest economies on the planet together.”
Famous for cutting deals, Trump could be the one to tie the economic knot. Trump has made clear that he prefers smaller trade treaties as opposed to sweeping global agreements. He ought to begin by looking across the Atlantic.
Trump has already promised the English people that he will end the British Bulldog’s exile from the Oval Office. Now he needs to follow up on that symbolic gesture. It’s time to make American trade with Great Britain great again. No doubt, Churchill would be elated.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
