Insight
Not a summit of ambition by Aslak Berg, Ian Bond and Charles Grant, 12 May 2025 The EU-UK summit should enable leaders to respond to the threatening global situation by putting past differences behind them. However, backward-looking dogma and unnecessary red lines may result in the summit under-achieving. EU and UK leaders will meet in London on May 19th for their first formal summit since Brexit. The atmosphere has certainly improved since the acrimonious period around Brexit. Britain’s Labour government came to power promising a reset in EU-UK relations. British ministers and senior officials meet their EU counterparts frequently, and find common ground on issues such as support for Ukraine. But instead of marking a decisive step forward, this could be a summit of modest outcomes and missed opportunities. The EU’s efforts to increase its defence capabilities and rebuild its defence industrial capacity will be hampered if the UK is excluded from them, while the UK risks painfully slow economic growth, at a time of trade war, if it fails to lower the barriers to trade with the EU. The global backdrop to the summit is grim, which should give London and Brussels plenty of incentives to work together. President Donald Trump has not completely cut off support to Ukraine, as seemed likely after his disastrous Oval Office meeting with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the end of February. But even after the signature of a deal giving the US preferential access to Ukraine’s mineral wealth and energy infrastructure, the Trump administration seems disinclined to step up US help for Ukraine or increase the pressure on Russia. Trump’s tariffs are already damaging the global economy, with the UK and EU both suffering. Though the British government is celebrating its success in getting a trade deal with the US on May 8th, that still leaves most UK exports to the US subject to higher tariffs than before Trump’s April 2nd announcements. Furthermore, the situation in the Middle East remains volatile, and renewed conflict there would almost certainly lead to more refugees trying to enter Europe, and more violent extremism directed at Western targets.
CER INSIGHT: NOT A SUMMIT OF AMBITION 12 May 2025
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