“Concern,” if that is the word, seems to be growing that Britain will exit the European Union. Prime Minister Blair, the former leader of Britain, has been bellyaching about it since August, and the New York Times, in a report this morning on the question. It notes that the current British premier, David Cameron, supports a plan that would place Britain “firmly in Europe’s outer tier.” It also notes that Mr. Cameron has been hinting that he could hold a referendum on an exit — dubbed “Brixit” —and that a recent newspaper report had it that “a senior cabinet minister wants Britain to threaten openly to leave the 27-nation bloc.” There was, the Times notes pointedly, “no official denial.”

The thing that gets us about this is the way both President Obama and Governor Romney are squandering this opportunity. Our president and the Republican candidate seem to be caught without a position on this question. Fox News had a wonderful story the other day noting that the question of Europe didn’t come up in the presidential debates at all. The Republican platform mentions Europe, en passant, but only in vapid terms. It says that America’s “historic ties to the peoples of Europe have been based on shared culture and values, common interests and goals.” It also notes that “[t]heir endurance cannot be taken for granted.”

“We honor our special relationship with the United Kingdom,” it says. But it doesn’t get into any of the particulars. It strikes us that the smart thing for America to do would be to get on the blower to Britain and offer some enhancements to the special relationship. Your editors have been of this view since Prime Minister Thatcher gave her famous speech at Bruges, Belgium, where she warned that Britain would not be sucked into the socialist vortex that is represented by Brussels. “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels,” Mrs. Thatcher said.

The Sun, we confess, hasn’t looked to President Obama or Secretary Clinton for leadership on this question. The president is himself of a European mind-set, preferring the kind of socialist hegemony that is represented by the state planners in Brussels. We would like to think, however, that Governor Romney is different. Yet even at Virginia Military Institute, where he gave the most detailed explication of his foreign policy view, the man from Massachusetts has been silent on all this. The question is whether this is a matter of indifference on Mr. Romney’s part or merely part of his strategy of avoiding a rocking of the boat before November.

We hope it’s the latter. It’s hard to think of a major foreign policy question in which so much impact could be had by a few encouraging words from Washington as the question of whether Britain leaves Europe. An expression of political support, a few financial or monetary enhancements to the special relationship, combined with an endorsement of a British referendum, they could do wonders. It may or may not be that the Europeans can form a national identity out of a confederation of countries with far greater political, cultural, linquistic, and religious differences than obtained in, say, the 13 American colonies in 1776. It is hard to see where England fits in with any of them and easy to see where it and America are better served by strengthening their own alliance.