I apologise for the fact that this is going to be a very long post. But events since the previous one have served not just to illustrate the analysis there of a new global divide, but to show this divide to be deepening very rapidly. As numerous detailed commentaries have explained, the Munich security conference and its aftermath have “laid bare the collapse of the transatlantic alliance”, showing that “the American security shield has gone forever” with the result that “it has been without question the darkest week for Europe since the 1940s”. Phillips P. O’Brien, Professor of Strategic Studies at St Andrew’s University, wrote last weekend that “this is arguably the most important week in European history since 1991 or even 1945”. Unlike those dates, what is happening in 2025 carries little in the way of hope, and, with Trump’s announcements and actions becoming more unhinged by the day, any hope there may be is fading very, very fast.
The analysts I’ve just quoted are not excitable catastrophists, but seasoned, respected experts in politics and international relations. I would like to think I share at least some of those qualities, to at least some degree, and, personally, having for nine years been dismayed by what Brexit has done to Britain, I now actually feel frightened by what may happen here. An obvious response to that would be that there are many places, most especially Ukraine, which have far more to fear. That is most certainly true (and it is also true of the US itself where state-induced political intimidation and fear are flourishing, to the horror of decent Americans). Equally, it may be objected that what is happening has little to do with Brexit. However, that is not true.
What’s it got to do with Brexit?
As all those analysts, and many others, make plain, these ongoing developments are not just about ripping up security alliances and global norms, and not just about the empowerment of nationalist ‘strong men’ to carve up the world according to their whims, crucially important as those things are. Rather, as well as what they mean for relations between states, the pronouncements coming from Washington, most recently in Vice-President J.D. Vance’s Munich speech, are proselytizing for far-right and ‘alt-right’ populism within states. Hence Vance’s praise for Brexit and his comments about the German and Romanian elections, which of course come on the heels of Elon Musk’s repeated interventions in British (£) and German politics.
The two aspects are linked. The Trump regime’s loathing for ‘Europe’ is multi-dimensional, seeing it as a parasite in security terms and the ideological homeland of elitism, woke liberalism, and globalism. The EU, specifically, is despised, and resented, as an economic and regulatory power and, perhaps more diffusely, as an exercise in rules-based international cooperation and pooled sovereignty. Indeed, hatred of Europe and of the EU is one of many strands binding together Trump, Putin and the Brexiters.
Since the UK is geographically, historically, economically and, in many respects, ideologically a European country, this necessarily poses profound questions for this country. But Brexit greatly complicates those questions, not simply because it means the UK is detached from the EU, but because Trumpist approval of that makes it quite likely that the US will attempt to exacerbate that detachment at precisely the moment when its folly is most obvious. That might take the form of offering the UK exemptions from new tariffs (about which much is still unclear) or other, including non-material, favours. Far from the present moment being one where, as Keir Starmer seems to think, the UK can once again be a ‘transatlantic bridge’, the reality is that it has the potential to rupture the country, ripping it further from its ideological and geographical allies in Europe but with no prospect of being anything other than the plaything of Trump’s increasingly vicious and unpredictable whims.
However, it is not just a matter of Trump seeking to meddle in Britain’s international relations and internal politics. Nor is it just that, in doing so, he will be joining Putin’s own longstanding attempts to do the same. If it were only that it would be obnoxious and dangerous. What makes it, also, frightening, is that both Trump and Putin have so many willing and powerful accomplices within the British polity*. That means, most obviously, Nigel Farage, the now dominant alt-right and NatCon elements of the Tory Party, the weird ex-RCP coterie and the Tufton Street mafia – both groupings which enjoy disproportionate media influence – and, it is increasingly clear, the ‘Blue Labour’ movement. And they would be neither so numerous nor so powerful had it not been for Brexit.
It was an apposite coincidence that, on the very same day that Starmer went to Paris to meet other European leaders this week to discuss Trump’s Ukraine démarche, the ‘Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’ (ARC) met for a major conference in London. This was a gathering of the assorted world-wide clans of populism and neo-fascism, with British representatives including Kemi Badenoch, Farage, and the ARC Advisory Board member Maurice Glasman of Blue Labour. For want of a better name, the UK contingent can be called ‘Brexitists’ since their bedrock belief is support for Brexit, denial of its failure, and commitment to some or all of its flawed logics.
There are many things at stake in all these unfolding developments, but for the UK, specifically, their immediate manifestation is the question of this country’s relationships with the EU and the US. The Brexitists are quite clear that this is the latest front in their battle, exemplified by Daniel Hannan (who else?) declaring (£) that “we can’t let Labour drag us back into the shrinking orbit of the anti-Trump Eurosphere”. He was right to identify Vance’s Munich speech as making it undeniable that there is a very fundamental choice to be made but, as usual, entirely wrong about what the response should be.
A new proposal for UK-EU relations
Nevertheless, a response will have to be found, and one proposal was made in a report commissioned by Best for Britain (BfB), which was published at the beginning of last week, and which received a lot of media attention (£). It is a timely, important, and serious piece of work, and warrants serious attention, as a constructive proposal to move beyond the current Brexit impasse and to engage with some of the emerging realities of Trump’s new world order.
The report models the economic effects of ‘strong regulatory alignment’ between the UK and EU as regards goods, and also as regards both goods and services, and then models each of these in the scenario of Trump imposing trade tariffs on all goods imported by the US (at an assumed rate of 20% for those from the UK and the EU). Importantly, pursuing strong regulatory alignment in the meaning of the report would not require the Labour government breaching its ‘red lines’ of not rejoining the EU, the single market, or the customs union, and of not agreeing freedom of movement of people. In that sense, it is intended to be a politically viable proposal from a UK perspective.
The ‘headline’ results are quite striking. With strong regulatory alignment in both goods and services, and if there were no Trump-tariffs, UK GDP could be up to 2.2% higher per annum in the long-run than it would otherwise have been, and, even in the event of Trump-tariffs, up to 1.5% higher. This would make a substantial dent in the standard (OBR) estimate of Brexit making UK GDP 4% lower than it otherwise would have been in the long run, and considerably more effective than the more basic ‘reset’, consisting simply of those things the UK and EU have specified they will seek, which John Springford of CER recently estimated to be worth 0.3% to 0.7% of UK GDP. Moreover, both for many individual EU member states and for the EU as a whole the result would be positive or, in the event of Trump-tariffs, would make their impact less negative than it would otherwise have been. So agreeing deep regulatory alignment is presented as a ‘win-win’ for the UK and the EU.
The core concept of the report is that of ‘strong regulatory alignment’:
“Regulatory alignment in goods in this scenario is based on the principle of mutual recognition by the UK and the EU of each other’s regulations. We envision an expansive approach to mutual recognition, in which the UK and the EU take active steps to minimise regulatory divergence and commit to recognising the equivalence of each other’s regulations.” (p.12, followed by a similar definition for services).
This will be very familiar to readers of this blog, and to Brexit-watchers generally, and perhaps will be ringing some alarm bells, because ‘mutual recognition’ has for years been seen by many Brexiters as the silver bullet to reduce the economic costs of Brexit. BfB, of course, are very far from being Brexiters, but whoever proposes it, it has the same problems. I’ve written about these numerous times before, most recently on the last occasion the idea surfaced.
What is ‘Mutual Recognition’?
This is a very complex issue to unpack in full. In broad terms, mutual recognition (MR) means that goods and services which meet the regulations within one market are deemed to meet those which obtain in another, and vice versa. Within that, one crucial distinction is between MR based on ‘equivalence’ and that based on ‘dynamic alignment’ (and/or other forms, such as MR of conformity assessment testing, which I won’t discuss here, though could also become relevant).
Under ‘equivalence’ agreements, the EU and the UK would recognize that, whilst different in some details, their regulations were broadly compatible, and each party would take responsibility of legally enforcing their own regulations. Under ‘dynamic alignment’ (DA) agreements, one party – and in practice it would almost always be the UK – agrees to completely track EU regulations, and as a result the UK’s regulations would be ‘recognized’ by the EU. This is really only ‘mutual recognition’ by courtesy, as the alignment is all one way, even though the ‘recognition’ goes in both directions, and both the source and the enforcement of regulations would ultimately lie with EU law and EU courts.
So, much depends on what form of MR is envisaged, and in that respect the use of the term ‘equivalence’ in the BfB report is either an unfortunate mistake or a problem. We already know that the EU is very reluctant to enter into equivalence agreements with the UK. They aren’t impossible (there are some in relation to aspects of financial services and, in effect, in the EU recognition of the ‘adequacy’ of the UK data protection regime), but as regards Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) regulations an ‘equivalence’ agreement (sometimes called a ‘New Zealand-style’ agreement) has already been proposed by the UK and rejected by the EU. By contrast, a ‘dynamic alignment’ (or ‘Swiss-style’) SPS agreement has been offered by the EU but rejected by the UK.
It isn’t just on SPS regulations that we’ve already been round this loop. MR based on equivalence in a number of areas featured heavily in the UK government’s February 2020 document on its approach to the negotiations undertaken by David Frost, under Boris Johnson, which ultimately led to the TCA. Almost all those proposals foundered, as they were bound to. In large part that was because what makes equivalence appealing to Brexiters (most especially lack of ECJ jurisdiction) is what makes it unacceptable to the EU. As Michel Barnier put it in 2018: “In the absence of a common discipline, in the absence of EU law that can override national law, in the absence of common supervision and a common court, there can be no mutual recognition of standards.”
What about expansive use of Dynamic Alignment?
However, although regulatory equivalence as the basis of expansive MR is a non-starter, what about ‘dynamic alignment’ (DA)? Since the EU does appear to be willing to use that form of MR for SPS regulation, could it perhaps be used expansively? It’s true that this would overcome the problem that lack of ECJ involvement poses for the EU. It also seems to be true that the presence of ECJ involvement is no longer a red line for the UK under the Labour government. Nevertheless, other issues would still remain.
In particular, even under DA each side has to monitor (and/or trust the other side to monitor) that both sets of regulations are aligned. This is a much more complex matter when DA is being used over a wide range of sectors, as envisaged by the report, partly because there is so much more to monitor and partly because there will often be difficulties in knowing where MR applies and where it doesn’t. This arises because crucially, even under the most ‘expansive’ use of DA, but unlike within the single market, the UK would retain the right to diverge in areas not covered by DA.
To take one increasingly important example, assume, as seems extremely likely at the moment, that the UK retains (and perhaps even exercises) the right to diverge in AI regulation. Given the extent to which AI looks set to be imbricated, in some way or another, within so many different business sectors across both goods and services, imagine how difficult it is going to be to determine whether, in relation to any particular product or sector, DA does, or does not, apply. I don’t say that it would be impossible, and certainly the AI example, specifically, is largely uncharted water, but it would involve huge technical complexity, at least if attempted not for one or two areas but at scale.
Indeed the problem isn’t DA agreements as such, it is scaling them up so as to meet the ‘expansive’ MR regime required to yield the headline economic benefits of the BfB report. Ultimately, that isn’t just about technical complexity, it is because the expansive use of DA is effectively an attempt to reproduce selective aspects of the single market but outside of the ‘ecosystem’ of single market agencies and institutions. As such, the more it is used, the more of a threat it would represent to the integrity of the EU single market meaning, at its most generic, the way in which membership confers distinctive advantages over non-membership. That notion, which some Brexiters tend to treat as meaningless or, alternatively, as some kind of EU ‘theological’ dogma, is actually of fundamental importance (hence, amongst other things, many of the issues that have arisen for Northern Ireland).
So (why) would the EU agree to it?
To that, there are several answers. One is that, unlike proposals for equivalence agreements, MR hasn’t been proposed before on a DA basis. Actually, that isn’t quite true, as arguably it was proposed, at least for goods trade, under Theresa May’s 2018 Chequers Proposal for a ‘common rule book’, but as that caused her government to implode it never really got to the point of being negotiated in detail with the EU in the form of a TCA, and would undoubtedly have encountered much resistance from the EU (I’m skipping over a lot of detail on this point). Still, something like it might eventually have been agreed and, anyway, we are now in different times, not least because EU concerns that Brexit might lead to a bigger exodus of members have now largely disappeared. Even so, the EU continues to face the possibility that an expansive DA deal with the UK might set a precedent, with member states seeking to ‘mix and match’ areas for alignment/ divergence.
The more important answer is that we are in different times because the economic situation of the EU, and especially of its largest members, Germany and France, is now much worse than it was in 2018, and the most important answer of all is Donald Trump. Those two things are related, because the state of many EU economies makes the threat of Trump-tariffs all the more dangerous. It is this, clearly, which the BfB report highlights, showing how a strong alignment scenario between the UK and the EU could offset some of the damage of Trump-tariffs, and it is on this basis that it is presented as a win-win proposal.
That may well be true, but, although the context is different, it is still a rather familiar idea, and another one which we used to hear from Brexiters. Their claim from the outset was always that there would be a very expansive post-Brexit deal, even to the extent of offering “the exact same benefits” as membership, because that would be in the interests of both sides, and they repeatedly complained that the EU was allowing ‘politics’ to get in the way of economic interests. In particular, they repeatedly argued that ‘German car makers’ (as an emblem for other EU industries) would ensure such a deal and, when that proved false, again framed that as an EU failure to represent the economic interests of its members and instead to prioritise Brussels ‘dogma’.
But (apart from their other flaws) these claims were mistaken by not recognizing that, whatever the immediate economic interests of some businesses, or even some countries, the long-term economic interests of all EU members and businesses were absolutely dependent upon retaining the integrity of the single market, and the expansive use of MR, even in its DA form, necessarily risks that, extensively recreating selective aspects of the single market for non-members. Now perhaps it is true that the possible impact of Trump’s tariffs will change the balance of calculations of the risks and benefits of this. But personally, I feel suspicious of yet again going down the track of making proposals based upon assumptions about what the EU will, or ‘ought to’ recognize as being in its own interests.
Having said all this, it could still be argued that Trump’s return, in a dramatically more aggressive and virulent posture than before, has changed everything, not so much, or not simply, because of the economic threat of tariffs but because of having started to rip up the international security order, and all the issues with which I began this post. Is this true? To be honest, I simply don’t know. In some ways, the opposite could be argued. To the extent that the single market is the economic basis of such geo-political clout as the EU has, that might suggest there is all the more reason to maintain its integrity.
Nevertheless, I do think that, despite what some ‘die-hard remainers' think, the understandable unwillingness of the EU to make economic concessions to the UK in return for security and defence cooperation, a proposition which was first made by May when Article 50 was triggered in 2017, and looked like blackmail then, may have changed. Almost everyone now thinks that Europe, as a continent, needs to get itself together as a serious defence player, and that is not going to be easy. It will entail the EU and its members doing many things they find distasteful, and this could be one of them. It might also be that previous, and again understandable, reluctance to entertain a complex and tangled MR-based relationship between the EU and the UK might be reduced. In a world which has suddenly become extremely disordered that might now seem a relative trivial piece of messiness. It would certainly be lazy simply to dismiss that possibility out of hand as ‘cakeism’, or to dismiss the very real differences created by Trump’s return. This isn’t 2016-2020.
The real choice
For all these reasons, there may well be a good argument for the UK to explore the BfB report’s ‘strong alignment’ model and propose it to the EU, at least informally, and see what the reaction is. But I keep coming back to the problem that it is very difficult to see how the EU can embark on a major deepening of relations without a high degree of confidence that the UK is going to be a reliable partner, and there is no real prospect of that whilst Brexitism remains so influential. After all, it’s perfectly realistic to think we may be only three years away from having a nationalist and populist government with a doctrinal hatred of the EU.
For Brussels, that would mean dealing with a UK government which has scant regard for acting in a trustworthy manner about any MR agreements which may be in force and would very likely revoke them anyway. The answer to that concern cannot, realistically, be that, if it happens, the EU can just revert back to the current TCA terms after having put in all the effort of creating an expansive MR regime involving a complex patchwork of agreements.
Some deny any such risk exists, arguing that UK business lobbies would prevent any future government from revoking agreements made by Labour. But this is really just the ‘German car makers’ argument in reverse, and the history of Brexit hardly suggests that business is very effective in controlling a government – in this scenario perhaps a Reform-Tory coalition – animated by ideological loathing of the EU and populist conceptions of ‘sovereignty’. So the risk is real, and it would be a very considerable one for the EU to take.
Moreover, although this wouldn’t in itself remove that risk, it can hardly be encouraging to the EU that the Labour government has not, as yet, made an explicit commitment even to seeking a DA deal on SPS, let alone to any more ‘expansive’ use of DA. As long ago as May 2023 I wrote a post with a footnote pointing out that whenever Labour politicians talked about an SPS deal they invariably invoked New Zealand (i.e. equivalence, not DA) as a model, and that has continued to be the case, so even in this headline area for the reset, the government still remains ambiguous about specifics.
For what it is worth, I think the government will seek DA on SPS, and will agree it with the EU, but it certainly hasn’t been open or enthusiastic about what doing so means, apparently because it fears the Brexiters’ reaction, hence again demonstrating the unsettled nature of the UK polity. So if the BfB report encourages the government to boldly advocate the use of DA, and to take on and defeat its Brexiter critics, then it will have done a good job.
On the other hand, if Brexitism were to be marginalised in the UK, overcoming this problem, then there would be no need to fiddle around with endlessly complex and sub-optimal MR agreements and security pacts as we could move, as quickly as possible, to joining the EU, boosting the continent’s economy, and developing a proper, fully-integrated, European defence and security capacity. So, for all the talk of the UK facing a choice between the US and the EU, the deeper choice that codes is the domestic one of what kind of country we are. That seems no closer to resolution now than it has been since, in 2016, we embarked on the poorly-designed, divisive and poisonous Brexit experiment, an experiment which has now become the most horrific of political lab accidents.
Note
*On the other hand, the British, Brexitist, variant of this global right-wing movement faces particular challenges. The British public has generally negative views about Putin and Trump, and a generally positive view of Zelensky (and support for Ukraine). Even Reform voters are strongly anti-Putin. As has been shown before Farage’s views of Ukraine and Putin are his most vulnerable political spot, and this is now becoming very clear.
Friday, 21 February 2025
Friday, 7 February 2025
Trump’s new world chaos offers possibilities for post-Brexit Britain
Last week, if anyone can remember that far back, the fifth anniversary of the UK leaving the EU provoked a welter of comment and detailed analysis from which it is hard to escape the conclusion that what I’ve sometimes called ‘the battle for the post-Brexit narrative’ is over. The public view that it was wrong to leave and that leaving has not been a success is entrenched and growing. The bulk of sensible and serious commentary, both in the UK (£) and abroad, endorses that.
Meanwhile, Brexit’s remaining defenders, such as Boris Johnson (£) and Nigel Farage, can only wail about the need to “believe” in Brexit, and the benefits they claim for it range from trivialities to demonstrable lies, the most frequent and most egregious being that it enabled an early Covid vaccine rollout. The very weakness of that defence, combined with the notable absence of celebration of the anniversary, show the abject failure of Brexit to deliver the promises made for it by its advocates.
The core problem in current British politics is that the Brexiters are too shameless to admit this failure, and utterly resistant to even the most modest attempts to address the consequences. Since, public opinion notwithstanding, this stance is baked in to both the Reform and Tory parties, and large and noisy section of the media, Brexit Britain is, as I wrote in my previous post, stuck. Like squatters, having trashed the house, they will neither get out nor allow the owners to repair it.
Thus a reversal of Brexit is politically unrealistic in any immediate timescale, and the government’s promised ‘reset’ is the only game in town. Yet even that has been pursued with frustrating timidity and slowness, not least because of the opposition of the Brexit wreckers.
However, in what has been a tumultuous two weeks, there are at least signs of the reset being pursued with more urgency and a little more resolve. Perhaps more importantly, the tumult, which derives from Donald Trump’s return to power, depressing and disorientating as it is, could present an opportunity to finally break out of the stale circles of the Brexit debate.
Reset: a new urgency?
It’s hard to deny that, even though these events were already planned, Trump’s explosive arrival in the White House put new meaning upon Starmer’s attendance at a meeting of EU leaders, to discuss defence and security issues, and the meeting next day of the EU-UK Forum, where EU Relations Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds delivered a major speech. At all events, although it was scarcely the first time that Starmer has talked about wanting an “ambitious” security partnership and reset with the EU, it was the first time that he and Thomas-Symonds set out a desire to agree a reset deal within the next three months.
It’s not clear how realistic this is, since the related announcement of a UK-EU summit to be held in May would imply that negotiations be completed in advance of this. Nevertheless, both the summit itself, which will be hosted by the UK, and the identification of a timetable, can be read as recognizing the need to deliver, and deliver quickly, on a reset which, so far, has mainly consisted of warm words.
Thomas-Symonds also spoke of the need to approach the reset with “ruthless pragmatism” in place of “ideologically-driven division”. Quite what this means is also unclear. Hopefully, it is a signal to British Brexiters (£) that the government is willing to take on their backlash against the reset, which I discussed in a recent post and which has been much on display in utterly ludicrous attacks on this week’s meetings in the pro-Brexit press*. If that is so, then it would be helpful for Thomas-Symonds, or Starmer himself, to give a big, uncompromising, and full-throated speech demolishing those attacks and advocating, with enthusiasm, a detailed agenda for the government’s still far too vague ‘ambition’. If not now, when?
Less optimistically, it might have been (or have also been) a signal to the EU that the government still clings to the familiar Brexiter line that Brussels should be more ‘flexible’ and less ‘ideological’ in its application of rules for third countries. That line is still, at least implicitly, what Farage believes would “improve” the existing deal, as if post-Brexit ‘red tape’ were an EU imposition rather than an inevitable consequence of decisions taken by UK and urged by Farage himself. I’m only guessing, but it seems to me at least possible that there are still people in the civil service and the cabinet who have the same view, if only because, even after all these years, there is still so much ignorance about how the EU works and what Brexit means.
But even the most optimistic reading of these developments (i.e. that Starmer intends to stand up to the Brexiters and to work realistically and rapidly to agree the most maximalist version of the reset), for all that it would mark a shift in gear compared with the last eight months, already seems inadequate to the scale and pace of events. For, based even on the short period since Trump returned to office, there is a good case for thinking that the fundamental recalibration of global politics, which I foreshadowed in a post in November, is now unfolding in plain view.
Trump’s global coup
That recalibration isn’t only, or even primarily, about Trump’s trade tariffs, which I’ll come back to. There is already a long list of other developments, including the pardoning of the J6 rioters; the forced deportations (with the associated bullying of Colombia and the planned re-opening and re-purposing of Guantanamo Bay); the quite extraordinary handing of access to government finance systems to Musk; the hounding of Federal agencies including the FBI; the attempts to suborn the CIA; the freezing of foreign aid; the purge of all forms of diversity initiatives; the bullying territorial claims made on Panama, Greenland and Canada; the grotesque and yet absurd proposal to “take over” Palestine and create a “Riviera of the Middle East”; the withdrawal from the Paris Accord and the World Health Organization.
That is only a partial list of what has happened so far, and there will undoubtedly be more to come, probably even as I am writing. But it is enough to eviscerate any lingering idea that Trump will show even the restraints of his first presidency. It may be chaotic, but is also a coup of sorts, and arguably an assault on the constitution. Under Trump, the US has launched a global attack on liberalism in its most general meaning, and on many of its specific attributes at home and abroad.
Even acknowledging that many of Trump’s announcements and executive orders are merely performative, that much of what he does will be heavily resisted, that his administration is likely to be characterized by incompetence and infighting, will not last forever, and may become domestically unpopular, it seems certain that the US will be permanently changed and, as a result, so will the rest of the world. Apart from anything else, it shouldn’t be forgotten that Trump is, in fact, doing what he promised he would do, and was given a clear endorsement for it by US voters. So, even if some of those who did so turn against him, it really can’t be denied that there is a deep groundswell of desire for the US to be a very different kind of country to that which, at least, the UK has known, or believed it has known, since, say, 1941. (I realise there is a lot that can be debated in and around that claim.)
Trump’s tariff weapon
When it comes to Trump’s new tariffs, these can be seen as an attack on economic liberalism, and to an extent they are motivated by economic protectionism. But they are not really, or at least not simply, about waging trade wars (although trade wars with China and the EU may be the result). More fundamentally, Trump is using trade as a weapon to intimidate other countries into doing his bidding in both economic and non-economic matters. The non-economic motive was most evident in the threat to Colombia, but was also present in those made to Mexico and Canada, and carried through against China.
The fact that Mexico and Canada struck last-minute deals on border protection to avoid the tariff attacks is in part an illustration of this, but it is also an irrelevance. For one thing, they are only temporary deals, and there is every reason to believe that, like a blackmailer, Trump will come back for more (and, even if he doesn’t, this episode will have done long-term damage to, for example, US-Canada relations). For another, the very rapidity of the reprieves is all of a piece with Trump’s almost cliched desire to ‘do the unexpected’ as a weapon designed to de-stabilize his perceived enemies. Indeed, as legal commentator David Allen Green has pointed out this week, although Trump is often described as ‘transactional’, his approach to deal-making is actually “anti-transactional”, so that “an agreement offers an opportunity to gain leverage, for a new negotiation, for a new exertion of power.”
However, whilst what is happening may be inflected through Trump’s baroque psychology (£), it is not reducible to that. He is both an expression of, and a vehicle for, a deep seam of sentiment in the US which sees the country as the put-upon victim of the international order (despite that order being largely the creation of the US). In that sense, Trump’s tariff attacks are part of the wider picture of a regime determined to use force to dismantle the constraints of law and convention abroad quite as much as those within the domestic sphere. That he has even spoken of the use of military force, extending to the sequestration of territory, against some of the US’s own allies means that, at the most basic level, the US can no longer be trusted by any of its allies.
Trump’s words and actions have therefore already fractured global society. It’s tempting to reach for historical analogies, which might range from Hoover’s Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, to the America First Committee, to the endless debates about whether Trump is a fascist. But they really aren’t necessary. It’s enough to observe that he is what he is, now; doing what he is doing, now. Perhaps in the future it may seem an overblown claim but, just at the moment, it is plausible to say that we are seeing the beginning of a new global divide between rules and brute force. It is also not necessary to romanticize ‘the rules-based international order’, or to sanitize the history of US foreign policy, to see this as a momentous and highly dangerous development, with the potential to shatter previous alliances and enforce more-or-less binary choices on almost every country in the world.
What of Brexit Britain?
If this analysis, or anything like it, is correct, then the issues it poses for the UK, specifically, go well beyond those of UK-EU relations, although they encompass those relations, and beyond those of tariffs. Thus most current discussions, which focus on Britain having to navigate a careful path in the event of a US-EU trade war, don’t fully address what is at stake. It is not even as simple as picking a side between the US and the EU. It is about picking a side between liberalism and illiberalism (or worse).
This would have created profound problems for the UK even without Brexit, given the role it had roughly established for itself as a ‘transatlantic bridge’. But EU membership would have half-addressed those problems, anchoring one end of the bridge even as the other imploded. As it is, the combination of Brexit and Trump 2.0 has burnt both ends. This poses questions about UK-EU relations, of course, but Trump hasn’t simply turned on the EU. In some ways, the bigger issue his presidency has raised for the UK is illustrated by his assault on Canada, not just with tariffs but with the extraordinary suggestion that it might “cease to exist” as an independent country and could become “America’s 51st State”.
This, then, is an attack on one of Britain’s closest and most longstanding allies, and, indeed, a country of which the British monarch is still the Head of State. The UK-Canada relationship is also, let us not forget, a prime example of the kind of ‘old friendship’ which the Brexiters claimed would be rekindled by leaving the EU. Some even continue to fantasise about ‘CANZUK’ and ‘the Anglosphere’. Moreover, Canada’s relationship with the EU was constantly held up as the template for what Britain’s should become.
In this sense, Trump’s hostility to Canada, quite as much as his hostility to the EU, presents a moment of choice. What, now, should Britain do? Keep quiet? Seek to ‘navigate’ a path to spare itself Trump’s disfavour whilst its ‘old friend’ takes its chances? Indeed one might ask what Farage, the man who always claims to stick to his principles, to care deeply about national sovereignty, and to have a hot-line to Trump, had to say about Canada this last week or so. The answer, so far as I can find, is nothing.
Similar questions apply not just to the UK’s relations with the EU, generally, but to those with Denmark, in particular, and with Greenland. They also apply, in a different way, to its relations with China, which Starmer’s government has recently tried to reset. And they also apply, again in different ways, to its relations with global institutions. To put all this a different way, the vision of, at least, the global Brexiters was of being ‘freed from the shackles of the EU’ in order to participate fully in a global order, including but not limited to a global trade order, an order to which the US now is wholly opposed and bent on destroying. Even the Brexiters’ more limited notion of the Anglosphere was predicated on the US as a bulwark of the ‘rules-based’ order. Equally, they looked to NATO as the sole international basis of UK defence and security, an approach which now looks increasingly precarious. So even if there had ever been a geo-political logic to Brexit, which there wasn’t, the entire basis of that logic is now rapidly disappearing.
A UK-US deal?
To the extent that the Brexiters have any response to this situation, it is the idea of the UK creating a Free Trade Agreement with the US (and/or an exemption from new punishment tariffs). Indeed, some clearly imagine that this, finally, will be a concrete demonstration of the benefits of Brexit.
However, it is an utterly inadequate response. Although there is no doubt that Trump will dangle this possibility in front of Starmer, that doesn’t mean he will do such a deal. In fact, as is already beginning to happen, he is likely to alternately hint that he is going to spare Britain or that he is going to punish us, just as a way of demonstrating his power. But even if he does a deal, his protectionism and nationalism, not to mention his own concept of deal-making, will mean that it will not be a good deal for the UK, and will come with numerous conditions. In any case, as Mexico and Canada are finding as regards USCMA, a deal with Trump is not worth the paper it is written on. His “anti-transactionalism” means he is always liable to make some new demands for obedience from the UK.
Most importantly of all, were a US-UK trade deal to happen in the new context Trump has created it would, for what at best would be only a small economic benefit, engender not just dismay but disgust from most of Britain’s friends and allies. Brexit Britain would cease to be regarded by them, as it has been since 2016, with bewilderment and even sympathy, but instead with loathing and revulsion, a Quisling in Trump’s global war.
The very idea that Brexiters like David Frost should think that their project is justified by the ‘freedom’ to act in such a cowardly and contemptible way shows the depths and desperation they have reached. Certainly their advocacy of dancing a humiliating jig to the tune of a capricious bully removes any vestigial illusion that they are in any way patriotic.
Starmer’s opportunity
The temptation for Starmer, partly as a matter of temperament, but partly because Brexit has left Britain in such an enfeebled position, will be to go on doing nothing and saying little other than platitudes. But inaction and quietude will amount to taking sides or, even worse, will be seen by each side as taking that of the other. Likewise, it will not silence the Brexiter call for doing a deal with the US, with Farage and his acolytes acting as Trump’s Fifth Column in British politics.
Conversely, Starmer has a real opportunity to exert leadership, and in the process has been gifted an opportunity to release Britain from the drift and dither to which it has been consigned by Brexit. He could, in one bound, position the UK as an international beacon of probity, as a strong regional partner, and perhaps even as a galvanizing convenor of medium-sized and small powers, and in the process marginalize Farage as an unpatriotic scoundrel. Similarly, resistance to closer EU ties from the Conservatives and their media supporters could be positioned as undermining Britain’s staunch support for its allies. Doing so would go with the grain of public opinion. Trump and his side-kick Musk are not popular in the UK. Equally, there is public support for closer relations with the EU rather than with the US, and probably (though I haven’t found polling data) for siding with Canada, Greenland/ Denmark, and perhaps even Panama, against Trump’s aggression.
In this way, all the talk still coming from Badenoch, amongst others, of ‘honouring the will of the British people’ and ‘retaining our hard-won Brexit freedoms’ as a reason to oppose the reset could at a stroke be derided as the tired repetition of long-outdated slogans, wrenching political discourse free of the detritus of 2016 and its aftermath. That wouldn’t imply re-opening the Brexit question, or crossing Labour’s ‘red lines’, but it would imply pursuing a maximalist reset with the EU, at speed, and with open enthusiasm rather than coyness and reluctance. Doing so would not just reset UK-EU relations, it would also reset UK international relations generally and, perhaps most importantly, reset the terms of domestic political debate.
Starmer may never have a better chance than now, and, if he is to take it, then the sooner the better if he is to get kudos for being at the forefront of this new global divide. Standing up to Trump in this way would not be easy or cost-free for Britain. Doing so would have significant security and economic ramifications. But the same is true of not doing so. And it’s even possible, given Trump’s bullying temperament, that standing up to him might earn Starmer a degree of grudging respect.
In some ways, Starmer is ideally placed to take this kind of stance. As I wrote recently, his persona and politics are very clearly aligned with the principles of ‘rational-legal authority’ in both the domestic and international spheres, placing him in direct contrast to Trump’s ‘anti-ruleism’. However, at the same time, and relatedly, he is almost preternaturally cautious, lacking vision and perhaps distrustful of the very concept of vision, and as a result inclined to ‘wait and see’ and to dodge hard choices. Hence his current rejection of the bare idea that there is a choice to be made between the US and the EU. That is misguided even if the choice is framed in that way. It is even more misguided when the choice is framed, as it should be, between accepting or rejecting Trump’s new barbarism.
*Of these attacks, probably none was more ludicrous than that of Kate Hoey. It isn’t only that she sees betrayal in the UK Prime Minister meeting EU leaders, it is that having campaigned for years against membership of the EU because of its supra-national powers she now proposes that the UK need not deal with the EU at all, but simply with its individual members. And this is only one aspect of the idiocy on display in just this short clip.
Meanwhile, Brexit’s remaining defenders, such as Boris Johnson (£) and Nigel Farage, can only wail about the need to “believe” in Brexit, and the benefits they claim for it range from trivialities to demonstrable lies, the most frequent and most egregious being that it enabled an early Covid vaccine rollout. The very weakness of that defence, combined with the notable absence of celebration of the anniversary, show the abject failure of Brexit to deliver the promises made for it by its advocates.
The core problem in current British politics is that the Brexiters are too shameless to admit this failure, and utterly resistant to even the most modest attempts to address the consequences. Since, public opinion notwithstanding, this stance is baked in to both the Reform and Tory parties, and large and noisy section of the media, Brexit Britain is, as I wrote in my previous post, stuck. Like squatters, having trashed the house, they will neither get out nor allow the owners to repair it.
Thus a reversal of Brexit is politically unrealistic in any immediate timescale, and the government’s promised ‘reset’ is the only game in town. Yet even that has been pursued with frustrating timidity and slowness, not least because of the opposition of the Brexit wreckers.
However, in what has been a tumultuous two weeks, there are at least signs of the reset being pursued with more urgency and a little more resolve. Perhaps more importantly, the tumult, which derives from Donald Trump’s return to power, depressing and disorientating as it is, could present an opportunity to finally break out of the stale circles of the Brexit debate.
Reset: a new urgency?
It’s hard to deny that, even though these events were already planned, Trump’s explosive arrival in the White House put new meaning upon Starmer’s attendance at a meeting of EU leaders, to discuss defence and security issues, and the meeting next day of the EU-UK Forum, where EU Relations Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds delivered a major speech. At all events, although it was scarcely the first time that Starmer has talked about wanting an “ambitious” security partnership and reset with the EU, it was the first time that he and Thomas-Symonds set out a desire to agree a reset deal within the next three months.
It’s not clear how realistic this is, since the related announcement of a UK-EU summit to be held in May would imply that negotiations be completed in advance of this. Nevertheless, both the summit itself, which will be hosted by the UK, and the identification of a timetable, can be read as recognizing the need to deliver, and deliver quickly, on a reset which, so far, has mainly consisted of warm words.
Thomas-Symonds also spoke of the need to approach the reset with “ruthless pragmatism” in place of “ideologically-driven division”. Quite what this means is also unclear. Hopefully, it is a signal to British Brexiters (£) that the government is willing to take on their backlash against the reset, which I discussed in a recent post and which has been much on display in utterly ludicrous attacks on this week’s meetings in the pro-Brexit press*. If that is so, then it would be helpful for Thomas-Symonds, or Starmer himself, to give a big, uncompromising, and full-throated speech demolishing those attacks and advocating, with enthusiasm, a detailed agenda for the government’s still far too vague ‘ambition’. If not now, when?
Less optimistically, it might have been (or have also been) a signal to the EU that the government still clings to the familiar Brexiter line that Brussels should be more ‘flexible’ and less ‘ideological’ in its application of rules for third countries. That line is still, at least implicitly, what Farage believes would “improve” the existing deal, as if post-Brexit ‘red tape’ were an EU imposition rather than an inevitable consequence of decisions taken by UK and urged by Farage himself. I’m only guessing, but it seems to me at least possible that there are still people in the civil service and the cabinet who have the same view, if only because, even after all these years, there is still so much ignorance about how the EU works and what Brexit means.
But even the most optimistic reading of these developments (i.e. that Starmer intends to stand up to the Brexiters and to work realistically and rapidly to agree the most maximalist version of the reset), for all that it would mark a shift in gear compared with the last eight months, already seems inadequate to the scale and pace of events. For, based even on the short period since Trump returned to office, there is a good case for thinking that the fundamental recalibration of global politics, which I foreshadowed in a post in November, is now unfolding in plain view.
Trump’s global coup
That recalibration isn’t only, or even primarily, about Trump’s trade tariffs, which I’ll come back to. There is already a long list of other developments, including the pardoning of the J6 rioters; the forced deportations (with the associated bullying of Colombia and the planned re-opening and re-purposing of Guantanamo Bay); the quite extraordinary handing of access to government finance systems to Musk; the hounding of Federal agencies including the FBI; the attempts to suborn the CIA; the freezing of foreign aid; the purge of all forms of diversity initiatives; the bullying territorial claims made on Panama, Greenland and Canada; the grotesque and yet absurd proposal to “take over” Palestine and create a “Riviera of the Middle East”; the withdrawal from the Paris Accord and the World Health Organization.
That is only a partial list of what has happened so far, and there will undoubtedly be more to come, probably even as I am writing. But it is enough to eviscerate any lingering idea that Trump will show even the restraints of his first presidency. It may be chaotic, but is also a coup of sorts, and arguably an assault on the constitution. Under Trump, the US has launched a global attack on liberalism in its most general meaning, and on many of its specific attributes at home and abroad.
Even acknowledging that many of Trump’s announcements and executive orders are merely performative, that much of what he does will be heavily resisted, that his administration is likely to be characterized by incompetence and infighting, will not last forever, and may become domestically unpopular, it seems certain that the US will be permanently changed and, as a result, so will the rest of the world. Apart from anything else, it shouldn’t be forgotten that Trump is, in fact, doing what he promised he would do, and was given a clear endorsement for it by US voters. So, even if some of those who did so turn against him, it really can’t be denied that there is a deep groundswell of desire for the US to be a very different kind of country to that which, at least, the UK has known, or believed it has known, since, say, 1941. (I realise there is a lot that can be debated in and around that claim.)
Trump’s tariff weapon
When it comes to Trump’s new tariffs, these can be seen as an attack on economic liberalism, and to an extent they are motivated by economic protectionism. But they are not really, or at least not simply, about waging trade wars (although trade wars with China and the EU may be the result). More fundamentally, Trump is using trade as a weapon to intimidate other countries into doing his bidding in both economic and non-economic matters. The non-economic motive was most evident in the threat to Colombia, but was also present in those made to Mexico and Canada, and carried through against China.
The fact that Mexico and Canada struck last-minute deals on border protection to avoid the tariff attacks is in part an illustration of this, but it is also an irrelevance. For one thing, they are only temporary deals, and there is every reason to believe that, like a blackmailer, Trump will come back for more (and, even if he doesn’t, this episode will have done long-term damage to, for example, US-Canada relations). For another, the very rapidity of the reprieves is all of a piece with Trump’s almost cliched desire to ‘do the unexpected’ as a weapon designed to de-stabilize his perceived enemies. Indeed, as legal commentator David Allen Green has pointed out this week, although Trump is often described as ‘transactional’, his approach to deal-making is actually “anti-transactional”, so that “an agreement offers an opportunity to gain leverage, for a new negotiation, for a new exertion of power.”
However, whilst what is happening may be inflected through Trump’s baroque psychology (£), it is not reducible to that. He is both an expression of, and a vehicle for, a deep seam of sentiment in the US which sees the country as the put-upon victim of the international order (despite that order being largely the creation of the US). In that sense, Trump’s tariff attacks are part of the wider picture of a regime determined to use force to dismantle the constraints of law and convention abroad quite as much as those within the domestic sphere. That he has even spoken of the use of military force, extending to the sequestration of territory, against some of the US’s own allies means that, at the most basic level, the US can no longer be trusted by any of its allies.
Trump’s words and actions have therefore already fractured global society. It’s tempting to reach for historical analogies, which might range from Hoover’s Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, to the America First Committee, to the endless debates about whether Trump is a fascist. But they really aren’t necessary. It’s enough to observe that he is what he is, now; doing what he is doing, now. Perhaps in the future it may seem an overblown claim but, just at the moment, it is plausible to say that we are seeing the beginning of a new global divide between rules and brute force. It is also not necessary to romanticize ‘the rules-based international order’, or to sanitize the history of US foreign policy, to see this as a momentous and highly dangerous development, with the potential to shatter previous alliances and enforce more-or-less binary choices on almost every country in the world.
What of Brexit Britain?
If this analysis, or anything like it, is correct, then the issues it poses for the UK, specifically, go well beyond those of UK-EU relations, although they encompass those relations, and beyond those of tariffs. Thus most current discussions, which focus on Britain having to navigate a careful path in the event of a US-EU trade war, don’t fully address what is at stake. It is not even as simple as picking a side between the US and the EU. It is about picking a side between liberalism and illiberalism (or worse).
This would have created profound problems for the UK even without Brexit, given the role it had roughly established for itself as a ‘transatlantic bridge’. But EU membership would have half-addressed those problems, anchoring one end of the bridge even as the other imploded. As it is, the combination of Brexit and Trump 2.0 has burnt both ends. This poses questions about UK-EU relations, of course, but Trump hasn’t simply turned on the EU. In some ways, the bigger issue his presidency has raised for the UK is illustrated by his assault on Canada, not just with tariffs but with the extraordinary suggestion that it might “cease to exist” as an independent country and could become “America’s 51st State”.
This, then, is an attack on one of Britain’s closest and most longstanding allies, and, indeed, a country of which the British monarch is still the Head of State. The UK-Canada relationship is also, let us not forget, a prime example of the kind of ‘old friendship’ which the Brexiters claimed would be rekindled by leaving the EU. Some even continue to fantasise about ‘CANZUK’ and ‘the Anglosphere’. Moreover, Canada’s relationship with the EU was constantly held up as the template for what Britain’s should become.
In this sense, Trump’s hostility to Canada, quite as much as his hostility to the EU, presents a moment of choice. What, now, should Britain do? Keep quiet? Seek to ‘navigate’ a path to spare itself Trump’s disfavour whilst its ‘old friend’ takes its chances? Indeed one might ask what Farage, the man who always claims to stick to his principles, to care deeply about national sovereignty, and to have a hot-line to Trump, had to say about Canada this last week or so. The answer, so far as I can find, is nothing.
Similar questions apply not just to the UK’s relations with the EU, generally, but to those with Denmark, in particular, and with Greenland. They also apply, in a different way, to its relations with China, which Starmer’s government has recently tried to reset. And they also apply, again in different ways, to its relations with global institutions. To put all this a different way, the vision of, at least, the global Brexiters was of being ‘freed from the shackles of the EU’ in order to participate fully in a global order, including but not limited to a global trade order, an order to which the US now is wholly opposed and bent on destroying. Even the Brexiters’ more limited notion of the Anglosphere was predicated on the US as a bulwark of the ‘rules-based’ order. Equally, they looked to NATO as the sole international basis of UK defence and security, an approach which now looks increasingly precarious. So even if there had ever been a geo-political logic to Brexit, which there wasn’t, the entire basis of that logic is now rapidly disappearing.
A UK-US deal?
To the extent that the Brexiters have any response to this situation, it is the idea of the UK creating a Free Trade Agreement with the US (and/or an exemption from new punishment tariffs). Indeed, some clearly imagine that this, finally, will be a concrete demonstration of the benefits of Brexit.
However, it is an utterly inadequate response. Although there is no doubt that Trump will dangle this possibility in front of Starmer, that doesn’t mean he will do such a deal. In fact, as is already beginning to happen, he is likely to alternately hint that he is going to spare Britain or that he is going to punish us, just as a way of demonstrating his power. But even if he does a deal, his protectionism and nationalism, not to mention his own concept of deal-making, will mean that it will not be a good deal for the UK, and will come with numerous conditions. In any case, as Mexico and Canada are finding as regards USCMA, a deal with Trump is not worth the paper it is written on. His “anti-transactionalism” means he is always liable to make some new demands for obedience from the UK.
Most importantly of all, were a US-UK trade deal to happen in the new context Trump has created it would, for what at best would be only a small economic benefit, engender not just dismay but disgust from most of Britain’s friends and allies. Brexit Britain would cease to be regarded by them, as it has been since 2016, with bewilderment and even sympathy, but instead with loathing and revulsion, a Quisling in Trump’s global war.
The very idea that Brexiters like David Frost should think that their project is justified by the ‘freedom’ to act in such a cowardly and contemptible way shows the depths and desperation they have reached. Certainly their advocacy of dancing a humiliating jig to the tune of a capricious bully removes any vestigial illusion that they are in any way patriotic.
Starmer’s opportunity
The temptation for Starmer, partly as a matter of temperament, but partly because Brexit has left Britain in such an enfeebled position, will be to go on doing nothing and saying little other than platitudes. But inaction and quietude will amount to taking sides or, even worse, will be seen by each side as taking that of the other. Likewise, it will not silence the Brexiter call for doing a deal with the US, with Farage and his acolytes acting as Trump’s Fifth Column in British politics.
Conversely, Starmer has a real opportunity to exert leadership, and in the process has been gifted an opportunity to release Britain from the drift and dither to which it has been consigned by Brexit. He could, in one bound, position the UK as an international beacon of probity, as a strong regional partner, and perhaps even as a galvanizing convenor of medium-sized and small powers, and in the process marginalize Farage as an unpatriotic scoundrel. Similarly, resistance to closer EU ties from the Conservatives and their media supporters could be positioned as undermining Britain’s staunch support for its allies. Doing so would go with the grain of public opinion. Trump and his side-kick Musk are not popular in the UK. Equally, there is public support for closer relations with the EU rather than with the US, and probably (though I haven’t found polling data) for siding with Canada, Greenland/ Denmark, and perhaps even Panama, against Trump’s aggression.
In this way, all the talk still coming from Badenoch, amongst others, of ‘honouring the will of the British people’ and ‘retaining our hard-won Brexit freedoms’ as a reason to oppose the reset could at a stroke be derided as the tired repetition of long-outdated slogans, wrenching political discourse free of the detritus of 2016 and its aftermath. That wouldn’t imply re-opening the Brexit question, or crossing Labour’s ‘red lines’, but it would imply pursuing a maximalist reset with the EU, at speed, and with open enthusiasm rather than coyness and reluctance. Doing so would not just reset UK-EU relations, it would also reset UK international relations generally and, perhaps most importantly, reset the terms of domestic political debate.
Starmer may never have a better chance than now, and, if he is to take it, then the sooner the better if he is to get kudos for being at the forefront of this new global divide. Standing up to Trump in this way would not be easy or cost-free for Britain. Doing so would have significant security and economic ramifications. But the same is true of not doing so. And it’s even possible, given Trump’s bullying temperament, that standing up to him might earn Starmer a degree of grudging respect.
In some ways, Starmer is ideally placed to take this kind of stance. As I wrote recently, his persona and politics are very clearly aligned with the principles of ‘rational-legal authority’ in both the domestic and international spheres, placing him in direct contrast to Trump’s ‘anti-ruleism’. However, at the same time, and relatedly, he is almost preternaturally cautious, lacking vision and perhaps distrustful of the very concept of vision, and as a result inclined to ‘wait and see’ and to dodge hard choices. Hence his current rejection of the bare idea that there is a choice to be made between the US and the EU. That is misguided even if the choice is framed in that way. It is even more misguided when the choice is framed, as it should be, between accepting or rejecting Trump’s new barbarism.
*Of these attacks, probably none was more ludicrous than that of Kate Hoey. It isn’t only that she sees betrayal in the UK Prime Minister meeting EU leaders, it is that having campaigned for years against membership of the EU because of its supra-national powers she now proposes that the UK need not deal with the EU at all, but simply with its individual members. And this is only one aspect of the idiocy on display in just this short clip.
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