By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS and MARK LANDLER
JUNE 24, 2016
President Obama boarding Air Force One on Thursday to travel to California. On Friday, Mr. Obama said, “The people of the United Kingdom have spoken, and we respect their decision.”CreditZach Gibson/The New York Times
PALO ALTO, Calif. — President Obama on Friday sought to assure Britainand 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’s first public reaction to the news from Britain came in a rather incongruous setting: the Global Entrepreneurship Summit at sunnyStanford 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.
“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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.”
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.
“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 that also means that cultures are colliding,” he added, “and sometimes it’s disruptive, and people get worried.”
Mark Landler contributed reporting from Washington
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