The Guardian reports:
The Obama administration has warned British officials that if the UK leaves Europe it will exclude itself from a US-EU trade and investment partnership potentially worth hundreds of billions of pounds a year, and that it was very unlikely that Washington would make a separate deal with Britain.
That’s the (europhile) Guardian’s introductory paragraph, but read the story carefully and it looks as if the story is more complicated than that:
The threat by [some of] Cameron’s ministers to back a UK exit in a referendum on the EU raised doubts in Washington on whether Britain would still be part of the deal once it had been negotiated. More immediately, Obama administration officials were concerned that the uncertainty over Britain’s future would further complicate what is already a hard sell in Congress, threatening a central pledge in the president’s State of the Union address in February.
The second sentence in that paragraph reveals a very different concern (that there will be no U.S./EU deal at all), as does this:
“Having Britain in the EU . . . is going to strengthen the possibility that we succeed in a very difficult negotiation, as it involves so many different interests and having Britain as a key player and pushing for this will be important,” a senior US official said.
Fair enough. The U.K. is a typically an advocate for free trade and, if the country were to leave the EU, it’s much less likely that any deal would be struck (France is, naturellement, skeptical about the whole idea) between the EU and the U.S.
While we are on the topic of the U.K.’s liberalizing influence within the EU, it’s worth spending a moment or two on the whining by “friends” of Britain such as Germany and Poland that have spent quite a bit of time of late claiming that a British exit would leave them unable to resist a move to a more dirigiste union. Well, if that’s how they really feel they should show it. Instead, Germany has spearheaded the Financial Transaction Tax, an attack on a key British industry motivated by a blend of spite and anti-market ideology, while Poland’s government has consistently aligned its unfortunate country with exactly the sort of hard-line eurofundamentalism that is pushing Britain towards the EU’s exit door.
To the extent that the Obama administration is using a potential U.S./EU free trade deal to pressure Britain to remain in the EU (a decision that would be contrary to both U.K. and U.S. interests), the Brits should pay no attention, and nor should its businesses (the real target of any such message). Getting out of the EU matters more to Britain than any potential free-trade deal, particularly one that will take years to negotiate and may very well amount to considerably less than many free traders now hope.