A no-deal Brexit approaches

March 29, 2019 has come and gone and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland remains a member state of the European Union. But probably not for long.

I interviewed my Brookings Center on the United States and Europe colleague Amanda Sloat on Facebook Live that morning just before Parliament voted Theresa May’s exit deal with the EU down for a third time, as we expected. Amanda’s been watching and explaining the twists and turns of Brexit, including nine blogs for Brookings on the “Brexit Endgame.” I’d also recommend her recent Foreign Affairs piece, her paper “Divided kingdom: How Brexit is remaking the UK’s constitutional order” from last fall, and her Time piece on Northern Ireland from last summer.

My own intuition for the past month or more is that the U.K. and the EU are headed to a break without a deal. May is a Conservative prime minister who set out to deliver a Conservative Brexit, and she negotiated one representing the weaker side against a unified European Union which prioritized Ireland’s bottom line of no hard border on the island of Ireland. But with May reliant on Northern Ireland’s hardline Protestant Democratic Unionist Party for her parliamentary majority since the 2017 snap elections, no special economic arrangement could be worked out for Northern Ireland. The hard Brexiteers in her party, heedless of the interests of the people of Northern Ireland, eventually made clear that they preferred the substantial risks of a no-deal Brexit to the potential that the U.K. stays in a customs union with the EU - if only in the contingency that they can’t come to a negotiated arrangement otherwise in 2020 under a backstop set up to guard the gains of the peace process. And May didn’t have enough votes between the two parties and from a few Labour MPs willing to buck their party to get her Conservative Brexit deal over the finish line.

Unless a fourth try by May works, we’re down to a no-deal crash out (which some hardliners welcome) on April 12 (or as late as May 22 if the EU is feeling generous enough to give the Brits more time to prepare), or the Parliament wresting away control to deliver a softer Brexit with the help of the EU for another extension which might well require general and European Parliament elections in the U.K. The crash out still seems likeliest to me, because the alternative is complicated and precarious - it requires an affirmative majority for something, which has been lacking thus far, it requires the acquiescence of 27 other EU countries with reasons to be torn about keeping the U.K. in for longer, and it faces hostility from both the lame duck prime minister and the hard Brexiteers. That alternative is still possible - fear of no-Brexit is what led the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson, and Dominic Raab to vote for May’s deal on Friday when they are on the record preferring no-deal - but time is running out. It’s going to be an interesting week in the British Parliament.

Measuring Transatlantic Relations

Brookings’s Center on the United States and Europe is out with the second edition of its quarterly Trans-Atlantic Scorecard. I’ve been involved in managing this project from concept to publication and promotion, and I’m looking forward to the picture that an increasing number of these snapshots of the troubled relationship between the United States and Europe will paint over time. That said, I’m not terribly optimistic for the near-term future of transatlantic relations. As my colleague Tom Wright argues, two years into the Trump administration, “observers can identify a unified, if still incomplete, Trump foreign policy in which the administration accommodates the president’s impulses and seeks to act on them.” That doesn’t bode well for NATO in the year the alliance turns 70 years old given Trump’s skepticism of alliances and demands for the Europeans to pay the United States more for their defense. The 70th anniversary summit will be held in Washington in April at the foreign ministers’ level in order to keep President Trump away and I fear he may show up at Secretary Pompeo’s show like the masque of the orange death. Wess Mitchell, the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and a committed Atlanticist who particularly treasures ties with Central and Eastern European countries like the Czech Republic, Poland, and the Baltics, has resigned effective mid-February. If there was a policy reason for that (I’m not sure there is), I would assume it has to do with problems coming down the line for NATO.

Anyway, the second survey of Brookings experts, conducted at the beginning of January, shows a decline in the health of the transatlantic relationship compared to the low starting point of our September poll. That’s a rating of 3.5 on a scale from 1 (poor) to 10 (excellent), down from 3.6. Security relations are down from 4.7 to 4.4. U.S. relations with France are down from 5.1 (the best score yet recorded in the survey in any category) to 4.3 as the Trump-Macron relationship has cooled off considerably. On the other hand, relations with Turkey have improved. In September, they scored at 2.5, the same as U.S. relations with Russia then and now. But they are now rated at 3.3. Trump also spoke on the phone with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan more than with all the other European leaders combined in the last four months (we track that). They had a few things to talk about (the Trump administration’s ultimately successful efforts to get Ankara to release pastor Andrew Brunson from custody; the Saudi government’s murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in its Istanbul consulate; Syria).

The Scorecard also includes topical questions (a plurality expected that Britain and the EU would manage to avoid a “no deal” Brexit, a majority saw Jim Mattis’s exit as secretary of defense as weakening the Trump administration’s commitment to NATO), a timeline of relevant developments including notable speeches, figures charting information relevant to transatlantic relations (ie. America and Europe’s respective trade with Iran and U.S. LNG exports to Europe), and Tom Wright’s take on what to watch going forward. I hope you find it an interesting read and a useful resource.

NATO Braces for Trump

The fourth step of Donald Trump's first foreign trip as president is a NATO summit. Given Trump's track record of questioning the U.S. commitment to NATO (though that's been walked back), the organization and its members are bracing for the meeting and coming up with some symbolic deliverables for Trump. Foreign Policy and Politico had good stories on this in the past couple days - with Politico quoting NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg saying "The president of the United States has a 12-second attention span.” I'm quoted in John Hudson's BuzzFeed News scoop published on Thursday May 18 that Trump's disturbing nationalist advisor Stephen Miller, a former Jeff Sessions aide, is writing Trump's speech for the occasion:

I'd obviously feel much better if [Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Europe and Russia] Fiona Hill was working on the speech, but the foreign policy adults in the Trump administration don't exactly seem ascendent this month... NATO members do need to spend more and more importantly improve their capabilities... But if this is a tough speech saying ‘pay more or else’ from a US president hated by much of the European public and seemingly untrustworthy when it comes to Russia, it won't be productive.

The dynamics at the meeting between Trump and each of western Europe's big 3 countries bear watching. Germany is entering election season and the anti-Trump card is perhaps the Social Democrats' best hope at improving their share of the vote, though Angela Merkel seems near certain to win re-election at this point. Merkel's government has committed to increase German defense spending to 2 percent of GDP, but slowly; the Social Democrats are hedging on that. This will be Emmanuel Macron's first meeting with Trump, and he will need to try to build a working relationship. And with Britain on its way out of the European Union, NATO looms larger as a key institution connecting London with Europe and the United States.