Anand Menon examines the difficult choices facing the UK government and the relationships with US and Europe
To govern, it is said, is to choose. Yet successful governments are often those that manage to sidestep difficult choices. Successive British administrations have done just that when it comes to our key international relationships: with Europe and the United States. The well-worn ‘bridge’ metaphor was intended precisely to convey this squaring of a potentially problematic circle. And Keir Starmer, yesterday at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, made the point more forcefully still: ‘The idea that we must choose between our allies. That somehow we’re with either America or Europe is plain wrong. I reject it utterly’.
And you can’t blame him. Choices, after all, can be difficult. That being said, the outcome of the US election means that panel choices may well await us.
Both relationships are crucial. The security relationship with the US is uniquely close. Meanwhile, the EU is the UK’s largest trading partner. Both Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey recently called for stronger ties with the EU as a way of minimizing the economic impact of Brexit.
Brexit has already undermined the UK’s ability to play its traditional ‘bridging’ function’. London has had to look on as Washington deals directly with member states in its attempts to shape what the EU does.
And then there is Donald Trump. Noone knows for sure how he will behave once in office. However, his team’s impatience with what they regard as European free riding – whether on defence spending or support for Ukraine – is well known. On trade, Trump has threatened to impose a blanket 10-20% tariff on all imports, while his administration will doubtless also have something to say on the subject of European dovishness when it comes to China.
Now the UK could try and do a deal with an incoming President. Increased defence spending, particularly spending on American weaponry (ideally kit we’d have bought anyway) might help eke concessions out of the White House. So too could an agreement on trade. At a minimum one that gained the UK exemptions from the mooted tariffs. More ambitiously, the kind of Free Trade agreement of which Brexiters have long dreamt....
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