Washington (AFP) - Britain's vote to leave the European Union was a severe blow to one of the United States' key alliances and a setback for its influence across the old continent. But can Barack Obama leverage what remains of the "special relationship" to smooth its exit and limit the damage to Western security and the global economy?
The US president travelled to London during the referendum campaign to back his friend Prime Minister David Cameron's doomed campaign against Brexit. And on Friday he was quick to defend the enduring "special relationship," a phrase coined by Winston Churchill in 1946 after the Allies' World War II victory.
Nevertheless, Washington analysts were unanimous that the shock result was a huge setback for the alliance and for US interests -- and urged Obama to help fix things. Following the vote, Britain will have to negotiate its departure from the world's biggest trading bloc without triggering a domino effect of economic catastrophe.
After speaking to Cameron on Friday, Obama said he was "confident that the UK is committed to an orderly transition out of the EU." But European leaders have warned that they will not give London an easy ride, fearing that a smooth Brexit will encourage other European powers to jump ship.
That would be counterproductive, warned Tom Wright of the Brookings Institution, if a stormy debate further disturbs markets and divides US allies in Europe. "In the last few weeks European leaders have taken a tough line and said there won't be concessions, but that may change now that the vote has happened," he said.
Wright did not downplay the scale of the harm Brexit would do to trans-Atlantic cooperation but said Obama could "mitigate" it by reaching out to France and Germany. There is a lot of anger in Washington at what experts see as Cameron's unnecessary gamble on a referendum, but most hope the alliance will survive.
So a disaster then, in the eyes of experts, but could Obama have done more to steer his ally through the mess of its own making? Analysts like Dalibor Rohac of the American Enterprise Institute, pointed out that the would-be "Pacific president" had somewhat neglected European ties.
And Britain too, in the grip of austerity economics and fixated by referenda first on Scottish independence then on Brexit, has retreated from the world. "Much of the UK's political clout was related to its ability to steer European policy," said Rohac. "That clout is gone once the UK leaves."
