The US presidential contest; Brexit

[This is the latest post in my Google+ Collection, Social and Political Reflections.]



A couple of things I am following at the moment are the US presidential election process, and the UK referendum on membership of the EU.

I see Hillary Clinton as morally compromised and dangerous both to America and the world. I tend to agree with something Marc Faber said some months ago: Trump may destroy America, but Clinton will destroy the world. Actually, I think you could say America is already well past the point of no return. I am thinking of debt (especially sovereign debt but also consumer debt), the precariousness of the dollar, and demographic and cultural changes. Certainly the old Protestant values of thrift, hard work and self-reliance on which the country was built are rapidly disappearing.

My analysis of Donald Trump is very much in line with Scott Adams' analysis: Trump is a master communicator and he will probably win the presidential election.

I'm am also watching the UK referendum closely. When Boris Johnson first announced his decision to support the Leave campaign, I thought it would be enough to swing it. As I said then, it has been clear for a long time (if not from the very beginning) that the EU was all about a federal Europe. People were deliberately misled on this, but now there is no excuse: anyone with half a brain knows that continuing membership would entail a progressive loss of national sovereignty. Some, wary of nationalism, think this is a good thing. But I would say nationalism can be a positive force, and that it has a role to play in maintaining social cohesion within (if not between) the countries of Europe. God knows, most of the other cultural (especially religious) traditions which tied people together in benign and productive ways are dead or fading fast.

To my mind NATO (and American interventionism generally) is a far greater danger to peace than patriotic feelings.

Obama's warning

US President Barack Obama has responded to Boris Johnson's journalistic musings concerning the President's personal feelings about Britain. Johnson had been angered by, and was responding to, the President's strong endorsement of the campaign to keep Britain in the EU.

In his article, Johnson suggested that President Obama, on account of his family background, and specifically his Kenyan heritage, may well have less than positive feelings about the UK and its imperial past. He referred to a story that a bust of Winston Churchill had been removed from the Oval Office at the beginning of Obama's tenure.

The mainstream media came out strongly against Johnson, with accusations of racism, and various sources claiming that the removal of the bust was not Obama's decision at all.

Obama's subsequent comments confirm however that it was his decision.

"When I was elected as President of the United States my predecessor had kept a Churchill bust on the Oval Office. There are only so many tables where you can put busts otherwise it starts looking a little cluttered," he said.

“I thought it was appropriate and I suspect most people here in the UK might agree, that as the first African American president it might be appropriate to have a bust of Martin Luther King in my office to remind me of all the hard work of a lot of people who had somehow allowed me to have the privilege of holding this office.”

He claims to have warm feelings about Winston Churchill. "I love the guy," he said.

But his remarks also contained a warning about trade links with the US should Britons vote to leave the EU.

The Independent reports:

He said the US would rather the UK remained in the bloc, and said a unilateral free-trade deal between the two countries would not be a high priority for America.

He added that he was merely offering advice to a “friend” and that it was up to the British public which way they voted. [Britain votes on 23 June on whether to stay or leave the bloc.]

Sounds like a threat to me; and a curious one, given that the Obama administration will no longer be in place when decisions about a bilateral deal with a post-Brexit Britain would need to be made. [In the event of a vote to leave the EU, there would be an extended transition period during which Britain would remain within the trading bloc.]

In a piece written immediately after Boris Johnson's initial announcement of his support for the leave campaign, I suggested that his popularity and mainstream credentials could possibly swing the balance of probabilities towards Brexit. But the polls seem to indicate that a majority of Britons still favour remaining in the EU.

The UK and the EU

It may not seem all that significant that a popular moderate conservative figure in the the UK has come out in favour of Britain leaving the EU, but Boris Johnson is rather special, and I suspect his decision will tip the balance in the current referendum debate.

If Britain did leave, it would be very significant not just for the UK, but for Europe as a whole and to some extent for the wider world. For anyone with an interest in geopolitics, this is a big deal.

This is how Boris Johnson's article in the Telegraph in which he announced his decision to support the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union opens:

"I am a European. I lived many years in Brussels. I rather love the old place. And so I resent the way we continually confuse Europe – the home of the greatest and richest culture in the world, to which Britain is and will be an eternal contributor – with the political project of the European Union. It is, therefore, vital to stress that there is nothing necessarily anti-European or xenophobic in wanting to vote Leave on June 23."

Crucially, Johnson's stand will help convince wavering voters who are repelled by backward-looking, reactionary or xenophobic thinking that voting for Brexit does not not entail anti-European or unenlightened attitudes.

There is one aspect of Johnson's article I would quibble with however. Given that the pioneers of project which has resulted in the EU were intent on an eventual European federation and given the natural tendency of bureaucratic structures to take on a life of their own, couldn't the current situation, at least in general terms, have been reasonably predicted long ago – well before German reunification which (as Johnson notes) hastened moves towards integration, and well before the UK joined the Common Market in 1973?

In other words, could it not be seen as having been a mistake from the start to imagine (as many in Britain imagined or were persuaded to believe) that the progress of the new structures towards a unified federal state would be – while those structures remained in place – anything other than inexorable?

When in 1975 a referendum was held to determine whether the UK would stay in, the political establishment and the mainstream press were overwhelmingly in favour of doing so. This is no longer the case, and a British withdrawal is now very much on the cards.

If Britain does pull out, the consequences both for the future of Britain and for the rest of Europe are unpredictable. But it is certain that a British withdrawal would precipitate radical changes to a Continental status quo which – partly because of a poorly designed common currency, and partly for wider social and economic reasons – is already tottering and clearly unsustainable.