Shomporko Online News Desk: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and United States President Joe Biden are expected to reaffirm the relationship between their two countries on the eve of the G7 summit, despite warnings from Washington over simmering Brexit tensions.
The pair are set to agree on an “Atlantic Charter” when they meet in Cornwall, southwestern England, on Thursday for their first face-to-face talks since Biden assumed office in January.
The agreement will be modelled on the historic 1941 joint statement made by then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill and then-President Franklin D Roosevelt which set out Washington and London’s vision for a new world order after World War II.
Johnson and Biden will also reportedly establish a task force to look at resuming UK-US travel, which has been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, and discuss how to provide vaccines to the world’s poorer nations.
But the talks may be dimmed when Biden, as expected, warns Johnson – one of the leaders of the 2016 Brexit campaign – over frictions in Northern Ireland unleashed by the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union.
The US leader is concerned that Johnson’s heated disagreements with the bloc over the Brexit deal’s so-called Northern Ireland protocol may undermine a 1998 US-brokered peace deal – the Good Friday Agreement – that ended 30 years of bloodshed in the region.
“President Biden has been crystal clear about his rock-solid belief in the Good Friday Agreement as the foundation for peaceful co-existence in Northern Ireland,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters onboard Air Force One.
“Any steps that imperil it or undermine it would not be welcomed by the United States.”
Source_aljazeera.com
