Thread by @KellerZoe

The EU continues to act as a hostile state. The UK should treat it as such. We must shift our focus towards Asia and the Commonwealth.

— Daniel Hannan
telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/2…

Diplomacy is usually shaped by interests rather than past grudges. As Eurocrats were gradually replaced by successors coming fresh to the job, I expected the EU to concentrate on its own prosperity rather than entering into a series of needless scraps with its largest customer.

I was wrong.
The EU’s rage will last for years, possibly decades, and we need to adjust our foreign policy accordingly. I am not talking here of provocations (Michel’s outrageous claim the UK is blocking vaccines, aggressive tweets, petty diplomatic micro-aggressions ... ).

I am talking about the bellicose over-interpretation of the NI Protocol, the refusal to equivalence in financial services, the threat to requisition vaccine supplies.
In these cases, the EU cannot hurt the UK without hurting itself, yet it feels compelled to pick fights anyway.

With Brexit now a fact, and the trade deal agreed, the EU’s petulance has not. We need to face the truth that, affronted by our referendum, Eurocrats see the very fact of Britain flourishing as a kind of incitement.

I used my final speech in the EU Parliament to tell MEPs (in French) that they were losing a bad tenant and gaining a good neighbour. Boris (like May) never missed an opportunity to say that Britain would be “the best friend and ally the EU could have”.

Britain did not respond to the EU’s temporary imposition of an Irish border by withdrawing from the Protocol.
It offers equivalence in financial services to EU firms, even though the EU denies it to British firms (while granting it to Brazilian, Mexican and Chinese firms).

It has made clear that it will not retaliate against the EU’s vaccine nationalism by withholding its own supplies – the thing that Eurocrats keep falsely accusing it of doing.

None of this, though, has tempered the EU’s belligerence. There is no way to interpret the threat of a vaccine export ban other than as a hostile act aimed at Britain. Declaring that it would require export licenses, the EU carefully exempted every neighbouring state except one.

Its ban would not apply to Iceland or Morocco or Turkey or Belarus – only to the UK. Now, furious at Britain’s relative success, it has escalated further, threatening to commandeer factories, seize lawfully purchased supplies and violate intellectual property rights.

When a neighbour threatens you with wartime measures, you can hardly carry on treating it as an ally. The EU’s behaviour over the past year must prompt a reappraisal of our geopolitical goals. Such a reappraisal was, in any case, overdue.

Britain’s peculiar focus on Europe was a product of the Cold War. For most of the past four centuries, we have been a blue-water nation, chiefly interested in trans-continental commerce, open sea-lanes, and links to distant trading posts and, in time, colonies.

The 1945-1990 period was, in the larger sweep of our history, anomalous. Now, that focus has been reversed. On Wednesday, the Govt published its integrated review, heralding a pivot away from Europe towards India and the Pacific.

As the PM told the House of Commons: “The truth is that even if we wished it – and of course we don’t – the UK could never turn inwards or be content with the cramped horizons of a regional foreign policy.”

Britain is prioritising its relations with India, applying to join the Pacific trade nexus, the CPTPP, becoming an associate member of ASEAN and recalibrating its military and naval deployments. All these decisions are laudable in themselves.

But the EU gives us no choice.
When it denies us equivalence in financial services, it forces the City to diverge more radically in order to compete.
When it throws its weight around over Ireland, it makes it hard to justify our investment in the defence of Estonia or Romania.

When it threatens to blockade our vaccine supply – a targeted act of aggression, not aimed at any other neighbour – it sets a precedent for more anti-British embargoes, whether in the field of energy or raw materials.

We are thus both pushed and pulled towards a closer relationship with Commonwealth and Anglosphere countries. While individual European states might still be considered allies, the EU as a whole has chosen instead to be a rival.

And, with each year that passes, more foreign policy powers are transferred from friendly national capitals to an institutionally unfriendly EU bureaucracy.

Some countries – Australia, say – are so close to us in temperament and outlook that we can treat each other’s interests as semi-interchangeable, swapping the most intimate intelligence secrets and habitually combining our Armed Forces.

One day, good relations will be restored. But, for now, Brussels does not regard us as a neighbour whose economic success will enrich its own peoples, but as a renegade province whose wings need clipping. Our response must be to soar higher.