The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal it threatens remains on the president’s agenda before his term runs out.
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How those issues are handled is important, he said.
Asked about skills in dealing with political opponents and finding middle ground, Mr Obama said: “If you spend time with people who just agree with you, you become even more extreme in your convictions”.
“The UK would not be able negotiate something with the United States faster than the EU”, Obama said.
Obama held up the recent nuclear deal with Iran as an example of the power of diplomacy over force.
His warning over UK-US trade deals has angered campaigners for leaving the European Union – with Mayor of London Boris Johnson calling his comments “hypocritical”.
Maria Munir, a student at the University of York in northern England, told Obama: “I’m coming out to you as a non-binary person” – identifying as neither exclusively male nor female. “I implore you to reject those calls and I’m here to ask you to reject the notions and take a longer and more optimistic view of history”, the president said.
“It is the biggest intervention I can think of by an American president who has turned up in this way and intervened directly in the politics of a Western democracy since the end of the Cold War”, said Anand Menon, professor of European politics and foreign affairs at Kings College London. So the U.S. and the world need your outsized influence to continue, including within Europe, from intelligence sharing and counter-terrorism to forging agreements to create jobs and economic growth will be far more effective if it extends across Europe.
Obama was likely to face fresh questions about Britain’s possible exit from the European Union, dubbed Brexit, at Saturday’s town hall.
“I have never felt constrained in any way in straightening this relationship by the fact we are in the European Union – in fact quite the reverse”, Cameron said. “Sometimes I look back at what I said when I was running for office and what I’m saying today and they match up”.
Mr Obama, who is visiting the United Kingdom with First Lady Michelle Obama, will spend his second full day of his visit in London on Saturday. It was his way of participating in commemorations of the Bard on the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death.
The stop at the Globe, a replica of the circular, open-air playhouse that Shakespeare designed in 1599, rounded out a prince-filled week for the president.
Mr Obama went on to have talks with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who said afterwards that he had an “excellent” discussion with the President, with subject matter including inequality and the impact of technology and global corporations on world populations.
The move toward a Brexit began in 2013, when Cameron, the country’s Conservative and euro-skeptic prime minister, promised to give British voters a chance to leave Europe. “What maybe got less attention was my statement that one of my regrets is not fully anticipating the degree of concentration of focus that would be required after the campaign to make sure that Gaddafi wasn’t killing his own people in Libya”, Mr Obama said. Shortly after Obama took office he chose to remove from the White House a bronze bust of Britain’s wartime leader placed there by his predecessor George W. Bush.
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Mr Obama is now heading to Germany on the last leg of his tour of the Middle East and Europe.
