The Europeans have misread Biden and misjudged Johnson

 A GERMAN VIEW ON AUKUS: 

Snookered by Anglo-Saxons: The Europeans have misread Biden and misjudged Johnson. A bad combination.

Why is the UK part of this shift, and not France? The US considers France and the EU unreliable with respect to China because of their special relationships. Germany and France have pushed the EU-China comprehensive agreement on investment just before Biden’s inauguration. Germany runs massive export surpluses with China that it wants to protect. Armin Laschet and Olaf Scholz are both in favour of extending the bilateral relationship. Europe has also left a door open to Huawei for its 5G networks. It was only the UK that really cut the links. The Chinese ambassador in the UK reacted with unbridled fury. His colleagues in Paris and Berlin, by contrast, stayed quiet. I assume that they have received reassurances through back-channels.

The UK is clearly the junior partner in Aukus. But it is the only European country the US can trust in the pursuit of its strategic interests in the Indo Pacific.

Given the quality of US leadership, I’m not sure how junior. Plus:

The UK’s strategic realignment was not inevitable. It is to a large extent the result of how the EU conducted the Brexit talks. The EU leadership never missed an opportunity to criticise Brexit. Donald Tusk, former president of the European Council, aligned himself to the second referendum campaign in the UK. The EU could have, but did not, support MPs in the UK who sought compromise, like Kenneth Clarke or Stephen Kinnock.

The second mistake, even worse than the first, was the intent to force the EU’s regulatory system on the UK as a price for a free trade deal. At no point did the EU even consider what kind of strategic relationship it wanted with the UK after Brexit. The EU let anger over Brexit get in the way over rational decision-making.

The enormous cost of this stupidity is slowly becoming apparent. The UK will not flood the EU with cheap goods, as France had feared. The UK’s strategy is more subtle. It will gradually cut off from European security policy. It will also cut off from the GDPR data protection regime and financial regulation. The UK has invested more into artificial intelligence than any EU member states. It is a permanent member of the UN security council and the G7. What on earth was the EU thinking?

And no, Biden is not going intervene on the EU’s behalf in the current standoff over Northern Ireland. EU leaders have always underestimated Boris Johnson. And they always overestimated Joe Biden.

Well, it’s easy to overestimate Joe.

Also: “The EU’s diplomacy is driven by emotion and a superficial understanding of US politics, and UK politics for that matter. Why did the EU place so much hope, so publicly, into regime change in Washington last year? Donald Trump was loud and crass, but all he ever did to the EU, other than insult them, was impose tariffs. Europe never experienced anything nearly as hostile as Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan or the Aukus deal. But all of this was perfectly foreseeable.”

91Posted at 8:31 am by Glenn Reynolds   

TO BE FAIR, WHAT’S THERE TO APPROVE? Iowa back to disliking Biden, just 31% approve.

59Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds   

O

EU - Overthowing UK Democracy

DANIEL HANNAN:
Our democracy is being overthrown by the EU’s Hideous Strength.

 “It’s not about Brexit any more, at least not primarily. It’s about whether we remain a democracy in the fullest sense. Our system depends on unwritten conventions and precedents. We expect winners to show restraint and losers to show consent. We expect our officials – including judges, civil servants and, not least, the Commons Speaker – to be impartial. We expect the electorate to be the final umpire. All these norms are coming under pressure as the campaign to reverse Brexit intensifies.”

55Posted at 10:22 pm by Glenn Reynolds   

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KLAVAN: Where Britain Goes, America May Follow  

By ANDREW KLAVAN

 @ANDREWKLAVAN

September 6, 2019

 8.9k views

The most meaningful political story in the United States this week wasn't unfolding in the United States. One of our potential futures was instead being played out in England, where Prime Minister Boris Johnson was fighting a pitched battle to bring the will of the people to fruition against the entrenched power of a multi-national elite.

Ever since a 2016 referendum in which British voters chose to leave the European Union by a 52% to 48% margin, the voters’ representatives have been doing everything they possibly can not to represent the voters. Prime Minister Teresa May swore that "Brexit means Brexit," then managed to fashion a leave deal so bad that even Brexit supporters thought it worse than staying. After May staggered off in tears, Boris Johnson took over the premiership swearing that the Brits would be out of the EU by the October 31stdeadline — a deadline already once extended.

BoJo made it clear that his willingness to "crash out" on Halloween with no deal would help him negotiate a better deal with an EU that does not want to let its grip on British power go. But Parliament — with the help of a largely anti-Brexit press and elite — has so far managed to stymie Johnson's strategy and may extend the deadline yet again — maybe forever.

The reason I say this is the most meaningful political story here in the U.S. is because it's the first real test of whether the English-speaking peoples can wrest back their power of self-governance. If Brexit fails, the situation here will not look good. If it succeeds, there's hope.

As Christopher Caldwell points out in his excellent Brexit piece in this summer’s issue of Claremont Review of Books, Britain's entry into the E.U. did not just result in a diminution of British sovereignty over its own affairs, it also transferred power from the people's representatives in Parliament to the elite’s representatives on and before the bench. British judges could now invalidate British law that conflicted with laws concocted in Brussels.

"Quangos [advisory bodies with government-appointed members] and foundations began designing cases — concerning migrants' rights, gay rights, search-and-seizure — that unraveled the centuries-old fabric woven from the rights and duties of British citizenship. A new fabric began to be woven, based (as are all such systems in Europe) on post-Civil Rights Act American law and on the litigative ethos of the American bar."

Here in America, a similar shift has taken power out of the hands of our representatives in congress and put it into unelected administrative bodies like the EPA and the Department of Education. These bodies serve the same "rights" oriented obsessions of the elites — and can make rules and enforce rules in a completely unconstitutional and anti-freedom manner that, so far, has had the support of a feckless Supreme Court.

Legislators love this system. They no longer have to study issues and fashion laws that have a specific effect. They no longer have to take real stances that could get them voted out of office. They simply have to pose for the cameras, use big, emotional words, take money from entrenched interests and then announce that they "did something" about the big issue of the day. The "something" is some 2,000 page collection of vaguely worded gobbledygook that can be interpreted by some drone at the EPA to mean he can do whatever he wants. When the EPA guy then rules that you can't go to the bathroom because your toilet is a public waterway, you've got no one to appeal to but the same petty tyrant at the EPA. Your property rights, your rights to due process, not to mention your vote, essentially mean nothing.

Donald Trump has done an excellent job of cutting regulations, but they'll bounce right back once the next person, Democrat or Republican, takes his place. The entire system needs to be dismantled, probably at the level of the Supreme Court.

With the election of Donald Trump and with the vote for Brexit, the English-speaking peoples are demanding their age-old representative systems back. If Boris Johnson succeeds in Britain, it will be a hopeful sign. But if the combined power of the elites and their press can prevent the crash out, then Trump, instead of the change we need, may turn out to be just a bump in the road that leads to the end of the republic.

Related: HAWORTH: Americans Must See The Brexit Betrayal As A Warning

There will still be an election in the UK, and Brexit will still happen - David Hannan

There will still be an election in the UK, and Brexit will still happen

by Dan Hannan

 | September 04, 2019  

Life in Britain is pretty great right now. It’s the loveliest time of year: The rankness of high summer has passed, but the hedgerows remain thick and green, flecked with the first hints of autumn color. We are gripped by one of the most dramatic Ashes series ever: our regular cricket clash with Australia. Employment is at record levels. The deficit has finally been eliminated. The governing Conservative Party is 10 points ahead in the opinion polls.

I feel I have to lay these things out for overseas audiences, because a casual glance at the headlines might give you the impression that the United Kingdom is in the throes of some terrible crisis. The New York Times and the Washington Post, in particular, now run hilarious articles on an almost daily basis about how dreadful everything suddenly is “because of Brexit.”

Yes, there is a crisis in Parliament, but, outside Westminster, things are ticking along very nicely. In the three years since the referendum, Britain has attracted more foreign investment than any country in the world except China. Our stock exchange is surging. There are more EU nationals working in the U.K. than ever, belying the NYT’s idiotic claims of a faltering economy, let alone rising xenophobia.

What of the shenanigans at Westminster? Well, one thing that I can state definitively is that they are not a “Brexit crisis." Brexit, as you must have noticed, has not happened. What we are seeing is the opposite of a Brexit crisis, an “un-Brexit crisis," a crisis caused by the refusal of MPs to do what they promised to do when they last stood for election.

As I write, the Opposition parties are seeking to overturn the referendum result. They don’t exactly phrase it like that, of course. Instead, they say that they don’t want to leave without a deal. But they know perfectly well that, if you rule out a “no-deal Brexit," you rule out Brexit itself. If "no-deal" is off the table, then all Brussels has to do to keep Britain in the EU is continue to offer intolerable terms.

On Wednesday afternoon, MPs passed a motion obliging the government to seek as many extensions as the EU wanted. Boris Johnson, the prime minister, responded by calling for a general election. Whereupon Labour, which has been demanding an immediate poll for two years, suddenly went cold on the idea. Under legislation passed in 2010, two thirds of MPs must agree to an early dissolution of Parliament. On Wednesday evening, Labour and the other opposition parties, looking at the opinion polls, voted against such a dissolution.

Yes, you read that correctly. The parties that have spent the past month accusing Johnson of mounting some sort of coup just voted to prevent him from subjecting his tenure to a national vote.

The House of Commons has thus put itself in a ridiculous position. Pro-EU MPs have voted to keep in office a government they have calculatedly undermined. They have done so for the sole purpose of overturning a referendum result which they had previously promised to uphold. That, my friends, is our political crisis in a nutshell.

Now the good news. Voters are not idiots. They can see what is going on. Sooner or later, probably sooner, there will have to be a general election. The Conservatives have, in effect, deselected 21 of their MPs, including several former ministers, for voting with Labour to prevent Brexit. Although that purge has horrified commentators, most of whom are in awe of the Europhile grandees, it is a necessary prelude to an election campaign that will turn on Brexit. The Tories could hardly fight an election promising to leave the EU while several of their candidates refused to accept that policy. Though the pundits are fainting like affronted matrons, voters appreciate Boris Johnson’s strength of purpose.

In the meantime, the loss of those 21 votes has deprived the government of its majority, making an election before the end of the year almost inevitable.

No one can say how it will turn out, obviously, though the betting markets and the money markets are both predicting a Conservative majority. Such a majority would at last allow Britain to square up to the EU without being undermined.

When British MPs defy public opinion, they often quote Edmund Burke’s 1774 speech to the voters of Bristol, in which he explained that he was their representative, not their delegate. The MPs rarely go on to mention that Bristol booted Burke out at the next election.

My guess is that something similar will happen when polling day comes. Even many remain voters balk at the idea of dragging the argument out any further. I’m going to stick my neck out here: Boris is going to win.