I’ve mentioned a few times in the last couple months the Bannon/Trump plan for the U.K. and the EU. It builds from Bannon’s (“Trump’s”) hostility to the EU and multi-national alliances generally. Prepare a ready-to-go trade agreement with Britain which will be finalized as soon as the UK departs the EU. This will strengthen the hand of the U.K. in its break-up negotiations with the EU. Once the U.K. is out of the EU and into its trade agreement with the U.S., so Bannon and Trump believe, the countries of Europe will feel they are not able to be excluded from a U.S.-U.K. trading space. Then the U.S. will offer the U.K. deal, as a working model, to the big European states, thus effectively dissolving the European Union.
This has always struck me as a deeply anachronistic take on the global clout of the United Kingdom, the fragility of the European Union and the centrality of the United States. Indeed, seeing a U.S. with the all-but-avowed goal of slicing up the EU seems almost a gift to those who want to renew the EU with a new sense of purpose after all the struggles of the last decade. Much of this thinking about the U.S. breaking up a collapsing EU has been amplified by the influence British gadfly Brexiteer Nigel Farage has taken up with the Trump administration over recent months.
In her speech this afternoon, British PM May is clearly playing to exactly this worldview, explicitly playing to the idea that the world will be led, run, dominated by an alliance of the U.S. and the U.K. She has gone well out of her way to laud the new dawn of Trumpism in the U.S. and bring the U.K. into alignment with all of Trump’s visible priorities — from hard sovereignty nationalism, to Russia and much more. I’m not sure why it hasn’t struck anyone as odd that the Prime Minister of the U.K. traveled to the U.S. and spoke to the GOP congressional retreat. That’s weird.
In any case, are we clear here that the U.K. is a potent but secondary player on the global stage? Certainly on the global economic stage? Don’t get me wrong. Depending on which method of counting you use, the U.K. is somewhere around the world’s 5th or 6th largest economy. It’s a really important country on many levels and a key US ally. But it is in the process of being outstripped by the economies like Brazil and India. Even Mexico, which has roughly three times the trade with the U.S. as the U.K., is well over a third the size of the U.K. economy measured in GDP.
All these constant invocations of Reagan and Thatcher just seem like a desperate gambit by a government in a desperate position.
