The Status Quo Party in Britain is growing worried that Britons could well decide to exit the European Union, we judge by the London Financial Times’ first editorial column of the year. It offers what it calls “the hard-headed case for the UK to stay in the EU.” That’s not a new demarche for the FT. It has been rattling on about this for years. But we detect a note of nervousness in its latest leader.

It predicts that the months ahead will be an “existential test of leadership” for Britain and its premier, David Cameron. “If all goes to plan,” it says — before quickly adding “and there is always a possibility it will not” — the prime minister “will complete within months” negotiating terms of Britain’s relationship with Brussels. The FT reckons that would “open the way for an In-Out referendum.”

Such a referendum, which Mr. Cameron promised some time ago, could come as early as late summer, in the FT’s estimation. It can’t come too soon for our taste. The FT notes that Mr. Cameron has “given every indication that he wants to stay in a ‘reformed’ union.” But it concedes that there is “no guarantee he will win” and reports that “it is already evident that the campaign will expose deep divisions among the ruling Tories.”

It just amazes us that not a single American leader is offering to our long-time ally some balm of hope in its Euro-crisis. Not a single politician has sought to illuminate a countervailing future for Britain than to spend the next century trying to protect the few shreds of sovereignty that will be left to it by a decision to stick with the European Union. What is the special relationship for if not for this?

President Obama wants none of it. As recently as July, he went on the BBC to suggest that the reason Britain is America’s “best partner” is — as it was put in a BBC online dispatch —Britain’s “willingness to project power beyond its ‘immediate self-interests to make this a more orderly, safer world.’” Our own view is that the reason Britain is such a profound partner of America is a shared concept of liberty.

Mr. Obama has gone so far as to warn that were Britain to vote for the Brexit — as secession from the EU is called — it would lose clout not in just in Brussels but in Washington. What un-presidential petulance. Think about that logic. Does anyone really think that the value of Britain to America is its ability — or, to be more accurate, inability — to temper the socialists in Brussels? What an insult to our fastest friend across the pond.

Yet not a single Republican candidate has marked this point. Where is Donald Trump? Where are Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, or Chris Christie? No one is saying that Europe is the most pressing issue on the planet. But Britain is an H-bomb state, a cradle of Western liberty, and an ally for most of the time since the Jay Treaty. In our estimation it would be far better for both of us were Britain to leave Europe and a stronger, closer alliance struck between it and America.

We’ve been making this point for some time. Now the clock is ticking, as the Financial Times is marking this weekend. We rue the absence of the kind of debates that we had between, say, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, a national conversation in which candidates spoke in whole paragraphs. Can it possibly be that there is unanimity between the Republican field and President Obama and Mrs. Clinton on the subject of Europe?