“More pernicious nonsense was never devised by man than treaties of commerce.” Thus declares Benjamin Disraeli in his novel, “Endymion.” As prime minister, however, Dizzy set aside such literary license, leaping at any opportunity to sell English goods abroad. Trade was, after all, key to the success of the British Empire on the global stage.

Not much has changed on that score since Disraeli’s day. Indeed, one Brexit aim was to uncouple the United Kingdom from the European Union’s sclerotic trade policy. For Brussels, a top-heavy bureaucratic regulatory regime took precedence over the entrepreneurial initiatives of Britain’s battalions within its producer class.

America, too, from its founding, is motivated toward greater opportunity and economic growth. Not all its leaders, though, are in sync with the aspirations of millions of wealth creators.

For at the referendum in 2016, when a majority of Britons voted to exit the EU, Vice President Biden confessed that he had “preferred a different outcome.” Nevertheless, based on the “long-standing friendship” between America and the United Kingdom, he would “fully respect the decision they have made.”

To wit: “America’s special bond with the United Kingdom runs deep and will endure.”

Four years on, like many of his previous political stands, Mr. Biden’s tune has changed. The former vice president has made what the Express calls a “stunning threat” to put the UK at the “back of the queue” for trade talks — another example of plagiarized phraseology. Like many another Democratic pol, Mr. Biden uses the excuse of peace in Northern Ireland.

The Democratic nominee, the Express reports, “has reacted furiously to claims this week that Boris Johnson will throw out the Brexit agreement on Northern Ireland.” The Express adds that a BBC correspondent, David Grossman, is saying that Mr Biden would “dismantle any progress made in the talks so far.”

The British government, meantime, is preparing to alter the terms of its 2019 Withdrawal Agreement. That bill only passed a hostile Remainer parliament by incorporating measures granting the EU concessions in relation to Northern Ireland, on the vexatious question of a “hard border.”

At the time, optimistic observers hoped that a successful round of U.K.-E.U. trading talks would make these concessions moot. Now, the fact of fractious negotiations and the likelihood that Britain will pull out of them by mid-October, to abide instead by World Trade Organization rules, creates a new twist.

For the Conservative government, it’s a question of its right to govern in Northern Ireland and preserving the Union — principally, to let UK goods trade freely within its borders. For Brussels, it’s all about the treaty obligations and British effrontery to put “sovereignty” ahead of EU sophistry.

UK premier Boris Johnson, whose defense of British liberties is notoriously lacking of late, does rise to the EU challenge. Mr. Johnson excoriates Brussels’ “extreme” interpretation of the Withdrawal Agreement, arguing that it will “carve up our country — to divide it.”

There’s no mistaking where the globalist Biden campaign lines up in this fight. It sides with the EU, under the specious argument that the integrity of the Good Friday Agreement, with peace and stability in Northern Ireland, is at issue.

Moreover, Mr. Biden must continually placate Democrat leftist progressives, who were crucial for nailing down the presidential nomination and whose support is vital in the fight for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Once more, Brexiteers can expect deliverance from the current White House occupant. For it was Donald Trump who came out during the EU referendum in support of UK independence.

And, when President Obama chided Britons that they would be relegated to the end of the line in any future U.S.-U.K. bilateral trade talks, Mr. Trump, then a presidential candidate, warmly embraced the idea and promised a free Britain would be a trade priority in his Administration.

On this issue, Brexiteers and Americans for liberty should agree. With national sovereignty and economic prosperity on one side, and subservience to trade impediments imposed by an internationalist bureaucracy on the other, what’s the issue?

If Disraeli mused that treaties of commerce were nonsense, what could be more ludicrous than ceding your independence to treaties of servitude?

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Mr. MacLean, a freelancer based at Nova Scotia, writes the Brexit Diary for The New York Sun.