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[/audioplayer]You don’t like Barack Obama’s foreign policy? Fine, I don’t either. You are impatient to know who the next president will be? Me too. But if you think that the current American president’s trip to the UK this week is some kind of fanciful fling, or that his arguments against Brexit represent the last gasp of his final term in office, then you are deeply mistaken. In Washington, the opposition to a British withdrawal from the European Union is deep, broad and bipartisan, shared by liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans alike.
I should qualify that: the opposition to a British withdrawal from the European Union is deep, broad and bipartisan — and shared by the shrinking number of Democrats, Republicans and diplomats who are still interested in and committed to the transatlantic alliance. The isolationist wings of both parties don’t care one way or the other about Brexit. But then, the followers of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders also don’t care about Nato, the special relationship, European security or anybody else’s security either.
Britain’s friends in Washington are opposed to Brexit precisely because isolationists of all political backgrounds are growing in numbers and influence all across the western world, and they don’t want Britain to join them, especially not right now. The institutions of the West are under attack in a way that they have not been for a quarter century, and Nato is not going to be able to counter all of them. A revanchist Russia is not content to flirt with military challenges to the western alliance, using its jets to buzz American ships or swoop close to British airspace; its leaders also seek to weaken western democracies from within by exporting corruption, buying politicians, funding radical parties and manipulating social media in the UK as well as the rest of Europe.
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