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Obama Says ‘Special Relationship’ With Britain Will Endure Obama Says ‘Special Relationship’ With Britain Will Endure
(about 5 hours later)
PALO ALTO, Calif. — President Obama on Friday said he was confident that Britain would make an “orderly” exit from the European Union following a vote by Britons to withdraw from the bloc, and that its “special relationship” with the United States would endure. PALO ALTO, Calif. — President Obama on Friday sought to assure Britain and the European Union that the United States would not pick sides once the two are divorced. But he acknowledged, somewhat ruefully, that Britain’s vote to leave the union, which he had publicly opposed, spoke “to the ongoing changes and challenges raised by globalization.”
Mr. Obama, speaking at Stanford University at a global entrepreneurship summit meeting, said he had spoken with Prime Minister David Cameron, an opponent of the exit who announced his resignation in the wake of Thursday’s vote, as well as with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. Mr. Obama’s first public reaction to the news from Britain came in a rather incongruous setting: the Global Entrepreneurship Summit at sunny Stanford University, 5,300 miles from London, where the president addressed a young, multicultural, tech-savvy audience that seemed worlds away from an older generation of Britons whose nationalist passions largely drove the vote.
“I’m confident that the United Kingdom is committed to an orderly transition out of the E.U.,” Mr. Obama told an audience of about 1,700 entrepreneurs, investors, academics, and other guests invited by the White House. “The world has shrunk,” he told the entrepreneurs, adding that they embodied this trend. “It promises to bring extraordinary benefits, but it also has challenges, and it also evokes concerns and fears.”
The president said his administration would stay in close contact with Mr. Cameron’s in the coming days as that process took hold. Rather than dwell on the wrenching change to come, Mr. Obama emphasized continuity. “One thing that will not change is the special relationship that exists between our two nations,” he said. “That will endure.” And, he added, “The E.U. will remain one of our Indispensable partners.”
“One thing that will not change is the special relationship,” Mr. Obama said. “That will endure.” The president said he had spoken with Prime Minister David Cameron, who told him Britain’s departure would be orderly, and with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who will loom even larger as a partner for the United States in a European club that no longer has a Britain as a member.
Mr. Obama said he discussed with Ms. Merkel the ramifications of the vote outside of Britain. But Mr. Obama’s soothing words did not disguise how personal a setback the vote was for him. In April, while visiting Mr. Cameron in London and celebrating the 90th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle, he implored Britons not to vote in favor of leaving. Britain, he warned, risked going “to the back of the queue” in negotiating trade deals with the United States.
“We agreed that the United States and our European allies will work closely together in the weeks and months ahead,” Mr. Obama said. The “Brexit” vote runs counter to Mr. Obama’s vision of open, interconnected societies, and it illustrates the frustrating cycle of his engagement with the world: “America’s first Pacific president,” as Mr. Obama has called himself, who tried to pull the United States out of the Middle East, now finds himself, near the end of his presidency, confronting a crisis in Europe fueled in part by the refugees attempting to flee the Middle East.
The results of the British referendum, he said, “speaks to the ongoing changes and challenges raised by globalization.” As a practical matter, the terms of the divorce vote will consume Britain and Europe for at least two years, making both less valuable as trading partners and less reliable as allies in dealing with a dangerous world. It will also deal a blow to Mr. Obama’s ambitious European trade deal, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which was already losing momentum on both sides because of growing anti-trade sentiment.
Mr. Obama had argued vociferously for Britain to remain a part of Europe only to see his position repudiated by the majority of voters. In a statement Friday, he praised the European Union, which he said “has done so much to promote stability, stimulate economic growth, and foster the spread of democratic values and ideals across the continent and beyond.” “From the start of the administration, we’ve wanted to work with them on all the big global challenges,” said Philip H. Gordon, a former assistant secretary of European and Eurasian affairs. “If it’s in the interest of the U.S. to work with the E.U. on Iran sanctions, on Russia sanctions, and on military interventions in the Middle East, then it’s a major setback.”
“The United Kingdom and the European Union will remain indispensable partners of the United States even as they begin negotiating their ongoing relationship to ensure continued stability, security, and prosperity for Europe, Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the world,” he said. At the same time, Mr. Obama has had an ambivalent relationship with Europe during his presidency. His heavy emphasis on Asia — a policy dubbed the pivot — stoked suspicions in Europe that he was moving away from the continent to the faster-growing markets of the East. In his first term, the centerpiece of his Europe policy was an effort to “reset” relations with Russia.
The statement came as world financial markets reeled from the results of the referendum and after Mr. Cameron announced his resignation. Mr. Obama and his top advisers, who spent Thursday night warily watching returns from Britain, were struggling to make sense of the implications of a result many of them did not believe would materialize. Critics said the tendency to take Europe for granted predated Mr. Obama. “Since 2000, both the Bush and Obama administrations have acted as if Europe as a task had been solved and that we no longer needed to ‘tend the garden’ as George P. Shultz used to say,” said John C. Kornblum, a former American ambassador to Germany, referring to Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state. “The Europeans played their part by acting as if they didn’t need us.”
Mr. Obama on Friday joined with Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder who is perhaps the best-known face of American entrepreneurship and innovation, to promote his administration’s efforts to help technology start-ups in the United States and around the world. Even after Mr. Obama worked closely with Europeans on difficult issues like the NATO air campaign in Libya, there was a sense that he looked on the trans-Atlantic alliance with a gimlet eye. In April, he struck a nerve by suggesting that Britain and France had been “free riders” in that operation, leaving the United States to bear most of the military burden.
But Mr. Obama’s final Global Entrepreneurship Summit at Stanford University is unfolding under the shadow of uncertainty and anxiety. The British referendum has underlined an intense strain of antipathy to globalization gripping voters there, and United States financial markets were in sharp decline. Some critics suggest Mr. Obama’s reluctance to be more militarily involved in Syria had an indirect effect on the British vote because of the flood of refugees the civil war has sent to Europe, destabilizing the continent and firing up nativist sentiment. Syrian refugees, however, account for far less of Britain’s immigrant population than they do in Germany, for example.
That is hardly the symbolism Mr. Obama was aiming for when he arrived in San Jose on Thursday evening, looking forward to a day of mingling with entrepreneurs, inventors and venture capitalists who typify his vision of how technology can drive social change, create economic opportunity and even foster diplomacy. Mr. Obama has a chance to demonstrate his support for Europe at a NATO summit in Warsaw next month. But there again, the loss of Britain as a member of the European Union will be felt. Britain has historically been one of NATO’s strongest boosters. It has resisted initiatives like a joint European military headquarters because it could compete with NATO. European officials said Germany and France might revive the proposal as a way to reinforce Europe’s unity in the wake of the British vote.
On Friday, he held a public discussion with Mr. Zuckerberg via Facebook Live, a streaming video platform on the social media network, and a conversation with entrepreneurs around the world on Google Portal, a virtual conference-calling application. Britain’s decision to leave Europe just as Mr. Obama was putting on an extravagant celebration of entrepreneurship and engagement in Silicon Valley undercut his message that innovation, open borders and free trade can improve people’s lives. It is the same assertion that has also underpinned his efforts to forge a new dynamic in the Middle East.
They are the latest technological milestones for a president who loves to revel in his geekiness and offer himself as a public example of the power of innovation, from his omnipresent iPad to his presidential Twitter account. In his Cairo speech in 2009 promising a “new beginning” in the Middle East, Mr. Obama first proposed to host entrepreneurship summits to explore ways to strengthen relationships between the United States and the Muslim world. The annual conferences proceeded as he envisioned, but the broader strategy has not been as simple to implement.
Mr. Obama is the first president to use Facebook — he chose a video distributed via the social media network to endorse Hillary Clinton earlier this month — and has yoked his administration ever closer to Silicon Valley, a popular destination for his senior advisers after they leave the White House and one of his favorite recruiting grounds. Mr. Obama acknowledged that much of the upheaval gripping American voters — an angst that is propelling the campaign of Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee — is driven by fear of technology-driven globalization and anger at job losses prompted by automation. Mr. Trump has exploited such fears, Mr. Obama told National Public Radio in December, calling them “justified, but just misdirected.”
He dined privately on Thursday night at an upscale San Francisco restaurant with technology titans including the venture capitalists John Doerr and Chamath Palihapitiya, the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and the entrepreneur outreach executives Elizabeth Gore of Dell and Mary Grove of Google. John Hennessy, the president of Stanford University, also attended and will introduce Mr. Obama on Friday. On Friday, even as he held a Google-sponsored virtual conference with entrepreneurs in Britain, Iraq, South Korea and Mexico, the president conceded that interconnectivity still makes many people uncomfortable.
The president has prioritized technological innovation during his time in office, promoting policies designed to foster it, including mammoth trade deals with Asia and Europe, and investing federal dollars in programs to train and support entrepreneurship. “We are better off in a world in which we are trading, and networking, and communicating and sharing ideas,” Mr. Obama said before a panel discussion with Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, on Friday.
But he has also conceded that much of the political upheaval gripping disaffected American voters and propelling the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, is driven by fear of technology-driven globalization and anger at job losses prompted by automation. “But that also means that cultures are colliding,” he added, “and sometimes it’s disruptive, and people get worried.”