It is traditional for every new British prime minister to visit the president of the United States with a gift. Gordon Brown brought a pen holder carved from the timber of an anti-slavery ship, David Cameron came with a fashionable graffiti art painting. But current Prime Minister Theresa May is the first to arrive with a brand new foreign policy — designed, it seems, especially for US President Donald Trump. Britain will never again, she says, seek to make the world in its own image. The two nations that once set themselves against an “axis of evil” have now created an axis of inaction.
Quite a turnaround.
This is not quite what was expected from May’s trip to Washington, but it squares broadly with her overall intentions. The prime minister is facing tough negotiations from the European Union (EU) and has, in Trump, someone who is willing to offer a free trade deal. He is also, in effect, asking how good a friend she is willing to be. She has now given more of an answer. Former British prime minister Tony Blair had travelled to Chicago to announce his Anglo-American policy of liberal intervention; May turned up in Philadelphia yesterday to repudiate it. Trump used his inaugural speech to say that America won’t “impose” its way of life on anyone. May has said “Amen”.
And with that, the trade talks can begin. If Trump’s election was a freak, then so is the opportunity that now presents itself to Britain on trade. The running down of the military over the last decade and more already meant that Britain could scarcely afford to attempt a military operation like that in Iraq. The far-smaller interventions in Libya also ended in disaster, which is partly why the House of Commons refused to let Cameron move on to Syria.
If Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had won the US election seeking a military ally, then May would have struggled to assure her that Britain had the muscle to continue a special relationship. But Trump sees politics, and life, as the art of the deal — and he viewed his meeting with May as an attempt to cut a free trade deal. He has been joking that he doesn’t (yet) have a commerce secretary, and wants to talk about trade, so he’ll handle this himself. Only Trump would have torn up the US State Department’s decades-old policy of supporting the EU. Only he would see May as a kindred spirit who dislikes invasions and seeks to restore faith in the nation state. And only he would feel a political need to sign a free trade deal with Britain, after abandoning so many multilateral deals. As he knows, deals work best when you negotiate with rookies — and there were plenty of those in the United Kingdom delegation. Many of those around May were not even alive when Britain last had the power to negotiate trade.
Skills have atrophied, institutional memory vanished. So what Trump calls the “art of the deal” — what to get, what not to give away — is not something of which anyone in the British government will have much experience. A quick deal may not be the best deal, but that’s a risk that the British prime minister has already decided that she has to take. He might have noticed how keen she is: New anti-interventionist foreign policy is as dramatic a gesture as it’s possible for May to make. But this reflects the optimism in her Cabinet about the prospects of a UK-US trade deal.
“A few months ago, it looked like we were at sea with only a small lifeboat to rescue us,” says one British Cabinet member. “Now, a huge cruise liner has turned up.” The question is whether it’s necessarily heading in a direction that Britain would like to go. May’s American shopping list is fairly short. She’d like a warmer welcome for British beef. Then access to Wall Street, which would mean US regulators being ordered to allow British firms to serve Americans (something former US president Barack Obama was unwilling to do). If Trump agrees, he’ll likely demand a price. Perhaps a dose of American interference with British financial services or that US health care firms are given access to Britain’s National Health Service. This is just the start of headaches that free trade deals can bring.
Then come the farmers, who have spent decades sheltered behind EU tariffs, quotas and subsidies. How much of this protection should survive? Those who have given this thought in May’s Cabinet are surprisingly radical — and quite prepared to administer some tough love. May has promised a transition regime, with subsidies protected. But a few years down the line, when cuts are inevitably sought, farmers will have much to be nervous about.
There is talk in the British Government about a New Zealand-style farming sector that manages without subsidy. This would force farmers to innovate, runs the argument, and move to higher-value products. Civil servants preparing for the negotiations with the US are sanguine about the complications, saying many of the arguments were rehearsed already with the now-aborted attempts for a EU-US trade deal.
The most important ingredient for a trade deal, they say, is political will — a commodity that has been topped up by Britain signing up to US policy on non-intervention. The stage seems set in Washington for the deal, with surprisingly little opposition at home. Even the Labour Party isn’t really raising fears of an NHS sacrificed on the altar of neoliberalism or mutant Texan steaks served up to unsuspecting customers in Wetherspoons. Indeed, Labour struggles to agree any position on Brexit — Europe looks to be splitting the party as badly as it did the Conservatives a generation ago.
The ceaseless opposition to the referendum result from the Liberal Democrats casts them as neither liberal nor democratic. In spite of everything, leaving the EU seems to have given the Conservatives a sense of unity and purpose that they have not had for years. Which is, perhaps, why May feels bold enough to tell her party that its support for the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan was misplaced and such exercises will not be repeated.
For a country that has always liked to shape the world, rather than be shaped by the world, this is quite some undertaking. The free trade deal she hopes to agree with Trump had better be worth it.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2017
