The world notices

From The (UK) Guardian:

Recall the fury of the leave crowd when Barack Obama dared puncture the Anglosphere fantasy by warning that a post-Brexit Britain would, in fact, be at “the back of the queue” for a trade agreement with the US, prompting Boris Johnson to reach for his racist dog-whistle and remind British voters that Obama was “part-Kenyan”. Recall too the needy relief of those same Brexiters when Michael Gove interviewed the newly elected Donald Trump and extracted a not-quite-promise that Britain and the US would “get something done very quickly”.

This week we got a double glimpse into what that “something” might be – and it wasn’t pretty. Most lurid was the sight of Donald Trump, international negotiator. His uselessness in this regard was already evident from his first meeting with Kim Jong-un in June, when North Korea’s leader bagged several major US concessions while Trump got precisely nothing. But the collapse of Wednesday’s meeting in Hanoi demonstrated again the mercurial instability of this US president, the lack of preparedness and basic statecraft by his team and the sheer unpredictability of doing business with Trump’s Washington.

Hanoi offered several warning signs for future UK trade negotiators, all of them blinking red. The obvious one is that Trump is prepared to walk away from talks that don’t go his way. Another is that, notwithstanding the failure in Vietnam, Trump maintains a clear, expressed preference for dictators over democrats. On Thursday he praised Kim as “very sharp” and “a real leader” – approbation he has never extended to, say, Angela Merkel.

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I took part in a sobering conversation with two former US state department officials who have had close dealings with the current administration. They made clear that Team Trump does not operate like any of its predecessors, barely drawing on the institutional wisdom of the US government machine, working instead in tight, secretive huddles open only to Trump loyalists.

What’s more, Trump can hardly be said to empower those who conduct trade negotiations on his behalf. Witness this week’s jaw-dropping video of a meeting in which Trump publicly contradicted, and hugely undermined, the US trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, in front of representatives of the Chinese government. Lighthizer said that a memorandum of understanding was a “binding agreement”; Trump said no, such a document “doesn’t mean very much” to him. He didn’t like the term at all. There and then Lighthizer and the Chinese team agreed to call their text something else, which made Trump much happier.

All of which brings us to our second glimpse of the kind of deal a post-Brexit UK might expect from the US. On Thursday Lighthizer released Washington’s “negotiating objectives”, starting with “comprehensive market access for US agricultural goods in the UK”. Translation: they want the right to fill our supermarkets with their chlorinated chicken.

  Guardian

To be sure, the US has always shoved our unwelcome agricultural Frankenstein shit down Europe's throat in trade deals.

There’s language in there that takes aim at the NHS [the UK's National Health Service], specifically at the health service’s power as a bulk purchaser to set prices, paying less for drugs than big pharma would like. The US demand for “procedural fairness” may well be an attempt to break that power, forcing the NHS – and everyone else – to pay more for medicine.

Some of these are demands any US administration would make, but others are Trump innovations. Note the US insistence that, on services, Britain take down all existing barriers to American exporters, while the US be allowed to maintain barriers that keep out British exporters. As Sam Lowe, trade analyst at the Centre for European Reform, puts it: “It’s a laughably one-sided demand.”

More striking is the US attempt to restrict Britain’s ability to sign a deal with a non-market economy such as China. So much for taking back control. If the UK were to sign up to these demands, we’d simply be trading one set of restraints on our sovereignty – restraints agreed by us and 27 other nations in Brussels – for another, dictated by Donald Trump in Washington.

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Right now, we are part of a bloc big enough to stand up to the demands of an America First Trump administration. After Brexit, we will be a single medium-sized economy standing alone, with much less ability to say no.

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[The idea of Brexit trading benefits] didn’t stack up in June 2016, but it is even more absurd now – abandoning the largest ever free trade area, right where we live, for a dictator-coddling would-be autocrat thousands of miles away, who sees us not as a trusted ally but as prey.

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Leaving Europe would always have been a mistake. Leaving Europe for the tender mercies of Donald Trump is insane.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.