Northern Ireland tensions pose a threat to UK-US trade deal

Hello from Washington, where the Senate is finally expected to confirm President Joe Biden’s pick for US trade representative, Katherine Tai, later this morning. Also on the agenda is a hearing on Capitol Hill with Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who is certain to be quizzed on visas and immigration. There’s also a St Patrick’s day bilateral meeting between Biden and Irish taoiseach Micheál Martin.

The subject of our main story is the renewed threat to the US-UK trade deal, caused by Brexit trade awkwardness between the UK and Ireland. Our person in the news is a rather unusual choice this week — we suggest you read on to find out why.

DC takes tough stance on N Ireland protocol

Chlorinated chicken, selling the NHS to rapacious pharma overlords and accidentally introducing a hard border on the island of Ireland as a result of Brexit. That has been the trio of headline-grabbing obstacles when it comes to the elusive trade deal between the US and the UK. 

The third one comes up surprisingly frequently here in Washington. For those of you unfamiliar with the ins and outs of Brexit, the problem revolves around the Northern Ireland protocol, a painstaking legal text agreed between the UK and the EU to prevent a hard trade border on the island of Ireland by applying checks on goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain.

As the UK tries desperately to detach itself from the EU bloc, of which Ireland is a part, US lawmakers have reacted angrily to any suggestion that the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), which in 1998 underpinned the peace settlement in Northern Ireland, will not be honoured. The response has generally been to threaten to jettison the UK-US deal in Congress (which lawmakers absolutely can do, much to the surprise of people unfamiliar with Washington’s ecosystem).

The most recent fallout between the US and UK on this issue — brewing ahead of President Joe Biden’s bilateral with Irish taoiseach Micheál Martin today — also involves the EU.

There have been two big fights about the Northern Ireland protocol since it was signed.

The first was in September last year when Prime Minister Boris Johnson decided he would like the UK to have more room to interpret the agreement, which prompted the resignation of the British government’s top lawyer. That caused Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, to warn there was “absolutely no chance” of a US-UK trade deal passing through Congress if the GFA was undermined (many in the US see the strict implementation of the Northern Ireland protocol, as agreed with the EU, as honouring the GFA — lawmakers have not liked Johnson’s reinterpretations).

The second fight is happening now. Britain earlier this month proposed to prolong grace periods from rules that kick in as part of the protocol, including allowing a longer exemption from paperwork attached to shipments of food from Great Britain to Northern Irish supermarkets. The EU says this is a unilateral measure by the UK and a breach of the agreement and has triggered a process that could see the UK hauled in front of the European Court of Justice. 

This latest battle has once again attracted attention in Washington. Lawmakers — led by Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, and Susan Collins, a Republican senator from Maine, have issued a resolution backing the GFA “and subsequent agreements and arrangements”, calling for the full implementation of the protocol.

Meanwhile, lawmakers such as Richie Neal and Brendan Boyle, both members of the crucial House ways and means committee, which has the power to block the UK-US trade deal (Neal is the chair), have been speaking with politicians from London, Belfast and Dublin about the implementation of the protocol. An aide said Neal had been encouraging both sides to uphold the protocol as intended. Neal, along with Boyle and fellow Democrats Bill Keating and Susan Wild, said earlier this week they were “extremely concerned” by the UK’s “unilateral decision” to extend the grace periods. 

Things are also complicated by discontent with the protocol from some pro-UK unionist politicians in Northern Ireland, who dislike any border between the region and Great Britain. The Ulster Unionist party in a letter to Biden argued that the protocol itself undermined peace. “At the heart of the Belfast Agreement is the principle of consent — the agreement that there would be no change to the constitutional position of Northern Ireland without the consent of its people,” wrote Steve Aiken, leader of the Ulster Unionist party. Those on Capitol Hill with an interest in the GFA and peace in Ireland have begun trying to get a better sense of the views of Northern Irish politicians in a series of Zoom calls.

The Biden administration is treading very carefully. In a call with reporters late on Tuesday, a senior official said the administration would not take sides, and would not comment on Johnson’s interpretation and handling of the protocol.

It remains to be seen if jettisoning the trade deal is a big enough stick to threaten the UK with these days, when the Biden administration has already made clear it will not prioritise such a deal when it has the domestic US economy to reboot. UK diplomats are already losing hope of a swift deal. And there is also, as we keep going on about, the clock set by the pesky Trade Promotion Authority legislation that allows trade deals to be fast-tracked through Congress. The two sides now have mere weeks to close the deal if they want to be protected by that legislation. 

All told, this may well end up growing into a much bigger diplomatic issue than the future of the US-UK trade deal, albeit one triggered by the trading arrangements between the UK and the EU. We’ll be watching the smoke signals today. 

Person in the news

Our person in the news this week isn’t a person, it’s a pineapple. Specifically a Taiwanese pineapple.

Most of these fruits usually make their way to mainland China, which — according to this article in Foreign Policy magazine — buys 90 per cent of the crop. However, an import ban imposed by Beijing earlier this year, supposedly on the grounds that the previous crop contained pests, has left Taiwan’s farmers with an awful lot of pineapples on their hands.

Taipei has, in response, come up with a cunning fix. It’s original riposte was to declare China’s actions illegal, saying the ban “flies in the face of rules-based, free & fair trade”. The fruit was “of the highest quality & meets the strictest international certification standards”. But, realising this was a little boring, they took another tack. In a piece of marketing that Edward Bernays, the coiner of the term PR and master manipulator, would’ve been proud of, foreign minister Joseph Wu took to Twitter to declare the juicy fruit “freedom pineapples” and called on friends of the island to stand with its farmers.

Since the tweet appeared in late February, local chefs have whipped up a variety of creative pineapple dishes, this Associated Press article reports. It’s also, according to local media, made headlines in Japan. How sweet does freedom taste? Very, it seems.

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