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Paul Taylor, a contributing editor at POLITICO, writes the Europe At Large column.
PARIS — It’s time for both the U.K. and the EU to take a deep breath and count to 100.
Since the beginning of the year, the U.K. has behaved like a moody teenager with a testosterone rush, determined to show his perplexed parents that he is totally independent and doesn’t need their help or advice, or even to share meals with them regularly.
Compounding the problem, the European Commission has just acted like an abusive parent in its panic over slow vaccine deliveries, threatening to smack a wayward child to cover up its own inadequacies.
The U.K. government’s attempt to downgrade the status of the EU’s ambassador in London less than a month after the Brexit transition ended — reclassifying the union as just another international organization — was a textbook symptom of an adolescent crisis. It had more to do with psychiatry than diplomacy.
Someone in Whitehall thought they spied a quick win in the race to flex the U.K.’s newly sovereign middle finger. This minor act of ideological spite probably wasn’t well thought through — unless of course Her Majesty’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office deliberately set out to poison the atmosphere of the new cross-Channel relationship from the get-go.
The petulant gesture is already backfiring on London, whose new envoy in Brussels is likely to have plenty of time on his hands until the U.K. backs down. This was entirely predictable. In 2019, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration reversed a similar attempt to demote the EU ambassador in Washington after the White House’s man in Brussels was frozen out.
Parents of difficult teenagers will be familiar with this behavior pattern, often accompanied by ear-splitting blasts of heavy metal music and a defiant neglect of personal hygiene.
For the next couple of years, Britain will be eager to demonstrate for domestic political reasons that almost anyone in its independent, sovereign universe is more important than the EU. The appointment of hardline former Brexit negotiator David Frost as Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s special adviser on Brexit and international policy underlined the message that the U.K. will be looking for new mates everywhere except in Brussels.
“Frost will not seek to build bridges with Brussels for a number of years,” a senior government official told POLITICO’s Cristina Gallardo. The most recent illustration of this approach: Britain is applying to join an East Asian trade community on the other side of the world with which it does a fraction of the business that is now at risk with Europe due to Brexit-induced paperwork.
So what should the grown-ups in the EU do? Experience suggests stay cool, patient and firm, focus on making European foreign and defense policy a lot more effective than it currently is, and wait for a break in the storm clouds. That may come sooner than imagined if, for example, a new crisis were to arise with Russia, Turkey or China that required coordinated sanctions. This week’s military coup in Myanmar could be such an event.
This is no time to be offering London a comprehensive, structured partnership on foreign and defense policy, as the EU’s Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier had originally sought to do. Nor is it the moment to coax London to join a European Security Council, as France and Germany have floated as a possible forum for regular cross Channel consultation.
Johnson is signaling very clearly that Britain wants to transact foreign and defense policy in Europe either through NATO, where it hopes to leverage its close relationship with the United States as a counterweight to the EU, or bilaterally or trilaterally with the other “big boys” — Paris and Berlin.
The U.K.’s long-awaited integrated foreign, security and defense policy review, due out in March, is expected to signal that Euro-Atlantic partnership through NATO is post-Brexit Britain’s top priority. Insiders say the policy document will acknowledge the EU as an important foreign policy partner without seeking to codify that in a formal relationship — the final wording is still being fought over — and will call for greater engagement in the Indo-Pacific region.
Veteran diplomats such as former National Security Adviser Lord Peter Ricketts argue it would be far more efficient for the U.K. to talk regularly with the EU than to have to lobby 27 member countries bilaterally on every international issue of common interest. But such pragmatic thinking is deeply out of fashion in the corridors of power.
Britain has at least agreed on procedures for exchanging confidential information with the EU, the first building block in any future discussion of issues such as sanctions policy.
In the year since it left the union, diplomats say a triangular dialogue of the so-called E3 — the U.K., France and Germany — has quietly been put in place at Berlin’s initiative. There have been meetings at both ministerial and senior official level, including a monthly secure videoconference of defense policy officials.
U.K. diplomats hope that dialogue will enable London to influence EU policy even though Britain is no longer at the table, on the assumption that Paris and Berlin can “deliver” the other member countries. That could cause misgivings in Paris and resentment among smaller EU countries.
What’s important now is that the U.K. and the EU learn how to live with one another. Fortunately, their long history of cohabitation gives them plenty to build on.
Britain is unlikely to take part in any crisis management operations under the EU’s common security and defense policy, since it would not be allowed a say upstream in planning and decision making. However, it will continue to support French and other European forces in the Sahel, providing three transport helicopters and crews for the counter-terrorism Operation Barkhane and a contingent of soldiers in the U.N. stabilization force in Mali.
British defense companies remain involved with European partners in joint armaments projects, including a new generation of missiles being developed by MBDA, an integrated company jointly owned by European aerospace giant Airbus, Britain’s BAE Systems and Italy’s Leonardo.
Whether the U.K. eventually joins some projects in the EU’s Permanent Structured Cooperation on defense remains to be seen. One test will be whether it seeks an administrative arrangement to collaborate with the European Defence Agency, as non-EU Norway, Switzerland, Ukraine and Serbia have done.
In the short term, perhaps the most that can be expected is a cooling-off period during which neither side fuels cross-Channel hostility.
Brussels certainly did not behave like the adult in the room when it decided, without consulting London or Dublin, to invoke an emergency clause to prevent vaccines hypothetically being exported to the U.K. via Northern Ireland.
That foolish decision was reversed before it was even implemented, but much political damage was done. If things are to be kept from deteriorating quickly, both sides will have to quickly learn to behave like adults.
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