WASHINGTON — In a town that loves a diplomatic drama, Brexit is barely a blip on the radar.

Despite the much-trumpeted “special relationship” between Washington and London, Congress isn’t really paying attention, said Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And the same can be said for the rest of the U.S. capital, according to more than a dozen lawmakers, diplomats, think tank analysts and members of the business community interviewed by POLITICO.

“Obviously people on the Foreign Relations Committee are more focused than others, but Congress-wide, there’s no focus,” Corker said.

For a start, there’s an attention deficit. When Corker held a February 3 hearing on the EU’s recent travails and what they mean for U.S. foreign policy, Brexit merited one brief exchange before the committee moved on to the migration crisis, Vladimir Putin, Greece and ISIL. Members of the Washington think tank community, which has a devoted core of Europe-watchers, say that amid the other crises it’s hard to drum up interest in the Brexit debate.

Oh, and there’s a presidential election going on — good luck competing with that.

But the ambivalence goes deeper. Many policymakers, business leaders and officials on both sides of the American political divide know they are supposed to care, but with the Brexit referendum still months away — and its political, economic and practical consequences far from clear even to Europeans — many are not sure what, or how much, to say.

Lack of talk doesn’t always signify a lack of interest. However American officials may feel about the debate, speaking up doesn’t always yield the desired results.

“There is not much of an understanding of what the consequences of England leaving would be," among business leaders in the United States, said Emanuel Adam, the London-based head of policy and trade at BritishAmerican Business, which represents business executives on both sides of the Atlantic. "There's not enough knowledge among the members and more needs to be done to give them basic information about this."

Lack of talk doesn’t always signify a lack of interest. However American officials may feel about the debate, speaking up doesn’t always yield the desired results. President Barack Obama has made his anti-Brexit views known, and his administration clearly sees a strategic interest in having the U.K. as an influential member of the EU.

But last year, when Obama urged Britons to stay in the bloc, he drew near-universal calls for him to butt out of British domestic affairs — underlining the risk that American officials and companies face in inserting themselves into the debate.

“The British public have gone completely skeptical of the United States’ foreign policy intentions,” said Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO.

That may not have put Obama off, with the president planning another attempt to sway British voters. “I know the president is planning to make a pretty big public reach-out in this regard,” Bob Corker said.

A sovereign issue

Even in the niche world of Brexit-watchers in Washington, making sense of Cameron’s proposals for changing the country’s relationship with the EU is no easy task.

But there’s a virtually unanimous view that a Brexit would be bad for Europe, which in turn would be bad for the United States.

“In Washington there’s a bias towards discounting this as a serious issue,” said Daniel Hamilton, a former State Department official during the Clinton administration and the founding director of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). “Most of us who focus on it can tick off reasons why it’s bad for Britain to leave.”

But they’ve all said they would support negotiating a free trade deal with the U.K. if it left the EU — an implicit signal that they’d understand the U.K.’s reasons for leaving.

Still, Nile Gardiner, director of the conservative Heritage Foundation's Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and a rare pro-Brexit voice on the U.S. think tank scene, sees why some conservatives sympathize with Brexit supporters.

“The idea that Britain should be restrained by decisions in Brussels is sort of antithetical to an American mindset,” Gardiner said. A Brit who has lived in the U.S. for 14 years, Gardiner served as foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney and has provided advice on Europe and U.S.-U.K. relations to Texas senator Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign.

Daniel Vajdich, a foreign policy advisor to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker before he dropped out of the 2016 presidential race, said that while Walker didn’t talk about Brexit on the campaign trail, his team did think the issue through, given that the notion of sovereignty is so important to some Republican voters.

“Vocally backing Britain's EU membership won't win you any Republican votes,” he said, “and might actually cost you a few if you're seen as someone who supports giving up sovereignty.”

On the rare occasions they’ve addressed the Brexit issue, former Florida governor Jeb Bush and senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have all stressed the need for U.K. voters to make up their own minds and taken shots at Obama for weighing in. But they’ve all said they would support negotiating a free trade deal with the U.K. if it left the EU — an implicit signal that they’d understand the U.K.’s reasons for leaving.

A changing 'special relationship'

Members of the Obama administration, on the other hand, have been doing what they can to discourage this kind of thinking. U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman hinted last fall that the U.S. would not cut a side deal with Britain if it pulled out of the EU, and hence out of negotiations on the transatlantic trade pact known as TTIP. “I think it’s absolutely clear that Britain has a greater voice at the trade table being part of the EU, being part of a larger economic entity,” Froman said.

The U.S.-U.K. partnership has been a centerpiece of British foreign policy since World War II, and “the administration does seem to believe that it’s in the U.S.’ interest to have the U.K. inside a strong, outward-looking EU,” said a former senior Western diplomat. “They believe the U.K.’s voice is more influential within the EU than it would be if the U.K. left.”

Goldman Sachs estimated that the pound would fall 20 percent if Britain left the EU.

That may be particularly true as Britain shows signs of taking a step back from the global stage militarily. John McCain, the Arizona Republican senator and 2008 presidential nominee, said it was worrisome when the British government stalled on providing the 2 percent-of-GDP level of military funding to which NATO members commit themselves — although Cameron eventually did commit to the budgetary guarantees.

“In various crises during the Cold War, the first person we called was the British,” McCain told POLITICO. “I wouldn’t say our relationship is better or worse. I would say it’s less. The British have ... dramatically reduced both their commitment to military and their involvement in the international arena. It’s just a fact.”

And Obama — who talked about the issue in a wide-ranging phone call with Cameron on February 2 — has signaled that EU membership may be key to the U.K.’s continued clout. “Having the U.K. in the European Union gives us much greater confidence about the strength of the transatlantic union,” Obama told the BBC last summer. “We want to make sure that the United Kingdom continues to have that influence.”

Corporate unease

The U.S.-U.K. economic relationship remains as strong as ever. Bilateral investment between the two countries is the largest in the world, and in 2013 U.S. foreign direct investment in the U.K. amounted to $571 billion, according to data from SAIS. In the same year, 987,000 U.S. workers were employed by U.K.-affiliated firms and 1.2 million people in the United Kingdom worked for U.S.-affiliated firms.

And while companies face political risks in weighing in publicly on the Brexit debate, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America all delivered six-figure checks to anti-Brexit campaign groups in January.

For these firms, Brexit uncertainty is worrying. Goldman Sachs estimated that the pound would fall 20 percent if Britain left the EU. The impact for American firms, say multiple business community sources, would depend on whether Cameron negotiated some sort of continuing link to the EU single market. Companies considering moving their headquarters to London would only make such a switch if they knew that location would still offer access to the single market, says Adam of BritishAmerican Business.

In the meantime, financial services companies operating in London are formulating plans for what happens if the U.K. leaves the EU.

And back on Capitol Hill, lawmakers will simply wait and see what comes next. In 2014, when Scotland was weighing an exit from the United Kingdom, the House of Representatives passed a resolution strongly encouraging the Scots to stay.

As with Scottish independence, if it begins to look like Britain will leave “it will get more attention,” said Senator Ben Cardin, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee. “The U.K. leaving would weaken Europe dramatically, and it could lead it to disintegrate. A strong Europe is in the U.S.’ interest.”