For Earth Day, Barack and David Recycle Some Cliches

In the quarter-center I’ve spent studying British relations with Europe, I have never seen, or read, a performance that recapitulated as many cliches as President Obama's press conference with Prime Minister Cameron on Friday. I suppose I should be grateful: in future, I won't have to spend months scrounging around British archives for materials to illustrate how poorly American politicians understand the European issue in Britain: Obama's given me all the sources I need.

I'm not going to waste time decrying the way Obama pretended to like Cameron: we've all read hisAtlantic interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, in which he makes it perfectly clear that he regards Cameron as yet another free-rider. Nor am I going to complain about how he reduced the Special Relationship to the fawning, and frankly embarrassing, desire of an unnamed staffer to see the Queen. Nor I am going to laugh about his pretense of being inspired by Churchill ("I love the guy!") or the Queen: since he only refers to Sir Winston and Her Majesty when he's in Britain, it's clear that they're just personages to be deployed rhetorically when convenient, not individuals to be respected, never mind learned from. And can any sane person say that the past seven years of U.S. foreign policy have shown even the slightest Churchillian touch?

No, let's just jump right in on Europe. I wrote my doctoral thesis at Yale in the 1990s on British relations with Europe in the 1950s, and its first application to the EEC (as it then was) in the early 1960s, and I've continued to research the subject since. A lot of what I have to say here borrows from that research, which focused on the way the British government tried to sell participation in Europe, in various forms, to the British people. So I've been thinking about this rhetoric, and how it's used, for a long time.

And the strange thing about Obama's performance is that, while he prides himself on rethinking U.S. foreign policy (and most of the time, I wish he wouldn't), he's absolutely managed to avoid having a single new thought about the EU. Here's what old, and not new again:

Uncle Sam Wants You. One of the longest-running issues in Britain's relations with the continent are the tensions created by the perception that the U.S. is seeking to bully Britain into a deeper political relationship with Europe than it actually wants. This was an issue almost from the very beginning – I found the first traces of public disgruntlement about it in 1961, when awareness began to spread of the Kennedy Administration's enthusiasm for a British application to the EEC. On the right, it surfaced in complaints (still heard today) that the U.S. was jealous of the British Empire, which later evolved into more contemporary concern for British sovereignty . The left, naturally, sees the U.S. as the home of unfettered capitalism (if only) and views Europe as a capitalist club (no laughs, please) that will destroy its chance of creating socialism in one country (current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn belongs to this school of thought). But no U.S. president has ever come out as forcefully for the EU as Obama did on Friday – and by doing so, he's validated every single British complaint about the U.S. role since 1961. Worse than that: by tying the U.S. to the EU, he's ensured that every single British complaint about the EU in Britain will now also be a complaint about the U.S. Great job, Barack.