It took Barack Obama to crush the Brexit fantasy
Recall Jonah Goldberg's pimping for "the Anglosphere" in The National Review?
Not happening.
O absolutely never fails to be a president to be proud of before the whole world.
He is excellent at the job.
He is a man of great stature, as is apparent in his handling of this issue.
But it’s the wider Vote Leave campaign that has found itself in the wrong place.
An anti-EU movement can’t also be anti-US, not without looking as if it hates everyone.
Nor is it good to pit yourself against an American president who, whatever his domestic standing, remains in high esteem in Britain and Europe.
It’s just too irresistibly tweetable to ask: if Obama’s for remain, and Trump and Le Pen are for leave, whose side are you on?
Above all, the core case advanced by the leavers on the US is flawed.
Fox and others say Obama is a hypocrite because the US would never accept for itself the limitations on sovereignty demanded of Britain by the EU.
But the comparison is silly.
Britain is strong and rich, but it is also a relatively small country adjacent to a continent.
The US virtually is a continent.
What makes sense for one would not make sense for the other.
Besides, as Obama explained in Downing Street, the US does trim its sovereignty when it suits its purposes: it agrees to be bound by the trade rulings of the World Trade Organisation and Nafta, even if that means Congress is forced to back down on its own decisions.
All told, the Obama visit has been one of those episodes that say rather more than was ever intended.
It says that this president retains a lustre even now, eight years on – one that only grows as you contemplate the contest to take his place.
It says that, for all of the remain campaign’s problems, Leave now has to rebuild – after a dreadful seven days that began with Treasury numbers showing Brexit will make Britons poorer, and ended with a surgical evisceration from the world’s most powerful man.
And it said something about Britain’s relationship with the US.
Ever needy to hear that we’re still special to the Americans, to hear that their president loves our queen and loves our talisman, Winston Churchill, we still listen to them – even when they tell us there’s no future for just the two of us together, that we need to stay in the marriage we’re in, even if sometimes it feels a little loveless.
The Guardian view on a key week in the EU debate: Obama sends the right message
It has been an important week for the Remain cause.
In what was clearly a coordinated push, with two months to go before polling day on 23 June, the pro-EU side has played two big cards – economic uncertainty and geopolitical instability – in the same week.
On Monday this took the form of the Treasury’s 180-page analysis of the economic impact of leaving the EU, a wide-ranging exercise that boiled down to the claim that every household will be worse off by £4,300 from leaving the EU and which was immediately dismissed by Leavers as merely a project fear exercise and as treating voters like children.
But there is already some evidence that this figure has cut through with the public, for good reason.
In the second half of the week, the focus has shifted to global stability.
First, eight former US treasury secretaries weighed in to warn that Brexit represents a critical threat to the global economy.
Plenty of home-grown economists also agree.
Now, Mr Obama has lent his weight in probably his last visit as president, determined to make a strong appeal for Britain to remain part of Europe.
So the Leave campaign has tried its best to knock away Mr Obama’s standing too, first challenging his right to express a view and then accusing him of “downright hypocrisy” for wanting Britain to stay in the EU, a position the US has held for decades.
The Leave campaign’s big problem with pinning any charge on Mr Obama is partly that both he and his country have standing to spare.
Mr Obama has not been the White House’s most assiduously pro-European occupant for the last eight years, so his standing here may be lower now than it was when he succeeded George W Bush.
But he and his office are both hugely respected, and under this president there is ample evidence that the US has been more internationally minded on issues from Cuba to climate change.
Mr Obama made sure on his arrival that he cemented his own standing here by arguing in a Daily Telegraph article that America’s sacrifices for Europe in two world wars gave him the authority to make his case, which it is hard to dispute.
On Friday evening Mr Obama went further, appearing alongside David Cameron (who himself has more standing than some might assume) to hammer home the message that America and its partners want Britain to remain fully engaged in multilateral alliances and that British membership of the EU remains central to their stability.
Barack Obama: As your friend, let me say that the EU makes Britain even greater
I will say, with the candour of a friend, that the outcome of your decision is a matter of deep interest to the United States.
The tens of thousands of Americans who rest in Europe’s cemeteries are a silent testament to just how intertwined our prosperity and security truly are.
And the path you choose now will echo in the prospects of today’s generation of Americans as well.
As citizens of the United Kingdom take stock of their relationship with the EU, you should be proud that the EU has helped spread British values and practices – democracy, the rule of law, open markets – across the continent and to its periphery.
The European Union doesn’t moderate British influence – it magnifies it.
A strong Europe is not a threat to Britain’s global leadership; it enhances Britain’s global leadership.
The United States sees how your powerful voice in Europe ensures that Europe takes a strong stance in the world, and keeps the EU open, outward looking, and closely linked to its allies on the other side of the Atlantic.
So the US and the world need your outsized influence to continue – including within Europe.
. . . .
Together, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union have turned centuries of war in Europe into decades of peace, and worked as one to make this world a safer, better place.
What a remarkable legacy that is.
And what a remarkable legacy we will leave when, together, we meet the challenges of this young century as well.
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