America has the upper hand in a trade deal with Britain

Paradoxically, though, “some of the things [the US is] asking for make a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland more probable,” Sam Lowe, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform in London, told me. He noted that even if Britain were willing to acquiesce to US demands for different standards on agricultural goods, the same cannot be said for the rest of the EU.

...As Lowe put it: “This always gets portrayed as a sort of pejorative thing about talking down Britain, and it’s really not. It’s just being realistic about power dynamics in these negotiations. Who needs a deal more?”