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LONDON – At least the phone didn’t keep him waiting.
British officials expressed relief that Prime Minister Boris Johnson was included in President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s first round of calls with foreign leaders on Tuesday, along with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Micheal. Martin from Ireland.
Some were concerned that Johnson’s ideological kinship to President Trump and his support for Brexit, which Biden had opposed, would put him at the end of the line, as President Barack Obama once warned Britain if it voted in favor. to leave the European Union.
But little Ireland’s inclusion on the list was at least as revealing as Britain’s, a red flag to diplomats that Brexit could still hamper the country’s cherished special relationship with the United States.
Biden spoke to Martin right after Johnson, according to Irish officials. He sent the same message to both men, “reaffirming their support for the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland,” according to a statement released by Biden’s transition office.
Downing Street did not mention Northern Ireland in its account of the call, preferring to focus on how Mr. Johnson and Mr. Biden committed to cooperating on “shared priorities, from addressing climate change to promoting democracy and better rebuilding to starting from the coronavirus. ” pandemic.”
The Good Friday Agreement, negotiated in 1998 under President Bill Clinton, ended decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. It has become a potential source of conflict between Biden and Johnson because Britain’s trade negotiations with the European Union could jeopardize the deal.
“It’s really quite blunt and deliberate that Biden brought up the Good Friday Agreement with Johnson,” said Bobby McDonagh, Ireland’s former ambassador to Britain. “The British generally don’t like it when American presidents raise Ireland with them, going back to Thatcher and Reagan.”
Biden, who speaks often of his Irish roots, warned Johnson during the campaign not to take any action that could undermine the deal. That came after the Johnson government introduced legislation to rewrite parts of its Withdrawal Agreement with the European Union that refer to Northern Ireland. The revisions, critics say, could lead to the resurrection of a hard border across Ireland.
Downing Street argues that the legislation, known as the Internal Market Bill, is intended to ensure that trade flows freely between Britain and Northern Ireland and is simply a safety net in case there is no trade deal. If Mr. Johnson hits one, he can always remove the offensive language.
By all accounts, Biden and Johnson did not get into the brush in their 20-minute exchange. The two have never met and the prime minister is carrying some luggage. He alienates people in Obama’s circle by once referring to “the ancestral antipathy of the partly Kenyan president for the British Empire.”
This time, Mr. Johnson seemed determined to get off on the right foot. He invited Mr. Biden to attend a conference on climate change in Glasgow next November and praised Vice President-elect Kamala Harris for her “historic achievement.” And it was noteworthy that he invoked the slogan “rebuild better,” one used by both the Biden campaign and his administration.
Obviously the Irish were less nervous about a call to Mr Martin. His office tweeted that he had a “very positive” conversation with Mr. Biden, then abruptly deleted it; he had not yet spoken to the president-elect.
For many in Britain, it was enough for Johnson to remain near the top of the incoming US president’s call sheet. British newspapers boasted that Biden spoke to Johnson before Merkel or Macron, although Biden officials declined to clarify the order of the calls.
Either way, it was a better demonstration than four years ago, when British diplomats were disgusted to learn that President-elect Donald Trump had received calls from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt before a of the prime minister. Theresa May.
Even Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull managed to reach out thanks to a private Trump number he obtained from golfer Greg Norman. (That turned out to be a mixed blessing: In another call a month later, the new president vigorously rejected an Obama-era deal to bring refugees from Australia and eventually hung up on the prime minister.)
Kim Darroch, the former British ambassador to the United States, finally connected his boss with Trump by tracking down the president-elect through his secretary at Trump Tower. It was an unusual experience that has little in common with Biden’s meticulously choreographed approach to foreign leaders.
“It was a useful signal to the British that Johnson was in the group of the top four Europeans and, I suppose, a great relief to Downing Street,” said Darroch. “Unsurprisingly, Biden’s team is much more organized on this than Trump. He did not find Erdogan and Sisi receiving the first two calls. “
