{UAH} JOE BIDEN THREATENS UNITED KINGDOM So did Obama

Joe Biden is threatening Britain over a complete nonissue

by Dan Hannan, Contributor | 

 

September 21, 2020 12:00 AM

 

No country has more to lose from resumed terrorism in Northern Ireland than the United Kingdom. More than 1,000 members of the British security forces lost their lives protecting civilians there from paramilitary violence. All in all, 3,500 people perished during the so-called Troubles.

So we really don’t need Joe Biden to tell us that “we can’t allow the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland to become a casualty of Brexit.” Trust me, Mr. Biden, we have a bigger stake in stopping the terrorist bombs than you do. We were on the receiving end of them often enough.

The Democratic presidential contender, who tells us that the best drop of blood in him is Irish, issued his pronouncement on Twitter in support of a letter from four members of Congress who had declared that a U.S.-U.K. trade deal was contingent on the Good Friday Agreement being maintained.

But the Good Friday Agreement is not in contention, and I write that as someone who criticized it when it came in — not because I opposed power-sharing (on the contrary, being of Ulster Catholic heritage on one side and Scots Presbyterian on the other, I felt I had a personal stake in the reconciliation of the two traditions) but because it essentially put all the parties in power, thus guaranteeing that they would support bigger government.

Not that anyone else cared. The Good Friday Agreement has since been sacralized — almost literally, in the sense that hardly anyone these days uses its actual title, the Belfast Agreement.

So what is it that Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and the various members of Congress are worried about? Biden says, “Any trade deal between the U.S. and U.K. must be contingent upon respect for the Agreement and preventing the return of a hard border. Period.” Again, fine. Who does he suppose is going to put up a hard border? London has been clear all the way through that there are no circumstances in which it will raise frontier infrastructure. There has always been free movement of people between the U.K. and the Irish Republic, and the tiny volume of goods traded across the land border (less than 10% of the trade between Britain and Ireland, most of which happens across the sea) does not require customs checks. Dublin is equally clear that it won’t put up any border posts. So where are they going to come from?

The thing that seems to have upset various congressional Democrats (and one or two Republicans) is a row between Britain and the European Union about the Withdrawal Agreement — a treaty that provides for an open border in Ireland, mutual recognition of each other’s citizens and their respective rights, and a hefty financial payment to Brussels. It was agreed alongside the promise of a free trade agreement, but it has since become abundantly clear that the EU doesn’t want to give Britain the kind of trade deal that it has given to, say, Canada or Japan. It wants extras, such as the right to fish in British waters, a veto over any economic policies that might undercut it, and a continuing role for its judges in Britain. When Boris Johnson refused, the EU latched onto a clause in the Withdrawal Agreement that was supposed to ensure that goods would not pass unchecked from Great Britain via Northern Ireland into the Irish Republic and threatened to refuse to certify food products from Britain in the same way that it certifies products from pretty much everywhere else in the world. There would, in other words, be checks on food moved from one part of the U.K. to another.

Last week, Johnson announced that he would amend the deal to prevent such a perverse outcome. That is all he is doing. Nothing he proposes would prejudice the Good Friday Agreement, let alone bring back a land border.

I suspect the four members of Congress know this perfectly well. Their long-term goal is to remove Northern Ireland from the U.K. Two of them were close to the armed republican movement that sought to change the status of Northern Ireland by force. Joe Biden, who said, “Ireland will be written on my soul,” and worked to get a U.S. visa for Gerry Adams, to the horror of the State Department and the CIA, is plainly content to go along with them.

Never mind that this is a shoddy way to treat an ally that stood by America in almost every struggle from Korea to Afghanistan. How utterly perverse to go into an election opposing a trade deal that would bring jobs and prosperity to the U.S. at no cost — all because of a confected problem.

EM         -> { Trump for 2020 }

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