With Northern Ireland resolved, Sunak should push Biden on trade.

If tension over the Protocol in Northern Ireland was the major stumbling block to UK US trade talks, now is the time to put it back at the top of the agenda, writes BritishAmerican Business CEO, Duncan Edwards.

?

When President Biden visits Belfast next week, the focus will be on the enduring success of the Good Friday agreement and the more or less complete eradication of sectarian violence that marred Northern Ireland for too many years.?At the same time, the Prime Minister should use any time he has with the President to press the case for a resumption of meaningful trade discussions between the US and UK.?

?

The fact the President is visiting in the first place, is in no small way due to the disciplined hard work and attention to detail that produced the Windsor Framework. This set of agreements solved most of the post Brexit trade conundrums and the Prime Minister deserves credit for finding a solution where none was obvious.?

?

US officials at multiple levels, have made it clear over the last two years that any continued post Brexit tension in Northern Ireland was an impediment to US UK trade talks. Yet so far it has been remarkably quiet on whether the Windsor Framework has now cleared the way for meaningful negotiations.?

?

Mr. Sunak should press the point.?The Biden administration has been largely absent from international trade for the first half of his presidency.?There was some helpful work done to resolve, or at least park, the disputes on large civil aircraft and the tariffs on steel and aluminum, but no real attempt to advance the trade agenda.?

?

The influence of organised labour and other opponents of globalisation is profound in the Biden White House and all trade agreements are lumped together in the same bucket marked ‘do not touch’.?

??

Sunak should go back to first principles, reminding the President that trade agreements are not zero sum.?US companies would benefit from enhanced market access and reduced financial and technical barriers and US consumers would benefit from reduced prices.

?

Of course, the same would apply to the UK but Sunak needs to focus on the US benefits.?Next, the PM should address the core concern head on:?at the heart of the anti-trade agenda is a fear that these deals lead to outsourced jobs - the classic hollowed out towns of the midwest that lost their factories to globalisation and in many people’s view led to the Trump presidency.?

?

Well, manufacturing jobs are not going to be outsourced to the UK because of lower wages; there are lots of other reasons to set up shop in the UK but wage arbitrage will not be one of them.?The vast majority of trade between the US and UK is now services and digital, not physical, and setting the rules around how this trade will be managed is a huge prize.?

?

Finally, Sunak should tell the President that we need the US at the table on trade as on everything else of importance to the world order.?The USA continues to be only half engaged at the WTO which is in desperate need of an invigorating reforming voice, and if it absents itself from new trade agreements the world will move on without them.?

?

We can see exactly this happening with the UK’s accession to the CPTPP in the Pacific, which not so many years ago was a grouping championed by the USA as a counterweight to China in the region.?

?

The negotiations for a trade agreement between the US and UK won’t be easy; a lot of progress was made three years ago in the dying days of the Trump era but the most difficult issues remained to be tackled.?

?

That said, our reading is that these problems, even the most tricky around market access for food, can be solved and an agreement reached which would have the support of Congress.

?

Now is the time to push.