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Spirits in the Irish government, bleak after late-night tendencies toward President Donald Trump, rose throughout the day as Joe Biden began to close the gap and eventually outmaneuver his rival.
Although the government publicly seeks to maintain a studied neutrality, they do not deceive anyone and they know it. The universal preference among all parties and all the upper echelons of government is Biden’s victory, for reasons of politics, politics, and personal preference.
But what would a Biden win mean for Ireland in the next few years? Would a Biden White House be friendlier to Ireland’s interests than the Trump administration has been?
“Well, there would be a visit in the third year anyway,” jokes Mark Garrett, former chief of staff for Eamon Gilmore, a tannaiste and foreign minister for the Fine Gael-Labor coalition, citing visits from John F Kennedy in 1963. , Bill Clinton in 1995 and Barack Obama in 2011, all in the third year of his first term.
Garrett also hopes for a White House that is instinctively friendlier to Ireland. Biden is of Irish Catholic descent and often talks about his Irish roots in Louth and Mayo, where former Taoiseach Enda Kenny took him golfing during a visit in 2016. He quotes Seamus Heaney at every opportunity available.
Warmer words
But what does this really mean? “I think the style of administration would be very different,” says a former diplomat. “They will be more orderly and polite. There will be warmer words. But I can’t imagine Biden doing something dramatically different on the business front. “
Other sources made the same point: that while a President Biden would not make as constantly hostile noises about international trade as Trump has done for the past four years, his policy should take into account the changing domestic environment. Trump’s “America First” trade policy may not have given him a second term, but he is popular with many of the blue-collar workers Biden has tried to woo as the natural constituency of Democrats.
“Trade has been a winner for Trump,” agrees Garrett. “Biden will have to accept that.”
Dubliner Thomas Wright, director of the Center for America and Europe at the Brookings Institution, a Washington DC think tank, says that while it is unlikely that a Biden administration will seek to revive the Transatlantic Association of Trade and Investment with the European Union, I would like to work closely with the EU on a number of fronts related to the economy, including cooperation against China on trade issues and the taxation of multinational companies.
The latter would set off alarm bells on Merrion St, whose reliance on American multinationals for corporate tax revenue has only increased as national revenue streams collapsed due to the pandemic.
However, Wright believes that there would be no specific target from Ireland, but rather a new US engagement with the OECD’s Beps process, or perhaps a direct bilateral initiative with the EU.
Brexi
He says high-level figures in a likely Biden administration have become convinced that multinational taxes are a major economic issue and believe there may even be opportunities for cooperation with Republicans on the issue. “Republicans have no interest in helping Amazon avoid taxes,” says Wright. “Old people [in a likely Biden administration] write and talk a lot about this. “
A Biden administration, he says, will likely lean heavily on Ireland in its commitments to the EU, especially since the UK leaves. He envisions a “super close relationship” between a Biden White House and Dublin.
Government sources in Dublin see a Biden White House as a “double lock” on the Brexit issue. While what is important to Ireland is that the House of Representatives maintains its position that there will be no trade deal with the UK if London tramples on the Belfast Agreement and the open border that followed it, there is satisfaction that the Biden White House be less instinctively friendly to the Boris Johson government than its predecessor.
More than one person also pointed out that traditional St. Patrick’s Day trips to the White House by the taoiseach, assuming they are possible in the coronavirus era, would be more fun. States have interests, of course. But in politics and diplomacy, relationships matter.
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