Donald Trump has ended the western alliance, requiring the UK to adopt a bolder, more independent foreign policy towards the US and China, the director of Britain’s most prestigious foreign policy thinktank has said.
Delivering her analysis in her annual lecture, Bronwen Maddox, the director of Chatham House, said: “The risk of staying silent and not standing up for the principles that have underpinned the liberal international order is that those principles do indeed become an article of history and not the foundation of the world we want to live in.”
She added: “The UK has performed a balancing act of some agility but to the point where it is hard to discern the policy.”
Maddox described Trump’s impulsiveness, taste for military action and rejection of international law as amounting to a revolution. She said US allies “must now contemplate what was unthinkable: to defend themselves against the US, in both trade and security”.
“It is not grandiose to call this the end of the western alliance,” she said, in the sense of countries “sharing principles of individual liberty, intellectual and religious freedom, constitutional democracy and free trade at their heart”. Maddox said these principles “have been the engine of their prosperity as well as the rationale for their global influence”.
She said in recent months we had seen “the rejection of principles of international law that the US helped forge – even if it often declined to apply those to itself”.
“Venezuela is the latest example,” Maddox said. “Trump’s intention to acquire Greenland is an offence against the UN charter and the prohibition on taking territory by force. If he did so by using force, as his team has threatened, it would be the end of Nato.”
In an interview with the Guardian, Maddox said one of the tasks of Chatham House would be to champion the need for new alliances and pacts in which countries stood up for principles that the superpowers were shredding.
“I understand the UK government’s inevitable pragmatism but at some point you have to stand up and say we have these differences over principle, and we are acquiring quite a list,” she said.
“The UK faces a huge dilemma, as does Europe. It wants two big things from America. One is trade and the other is help on defence, including support for Ukraine. The prime minister does not want to jeopardise those two. We have seen in so many ways how the Trump administration, including the president, can react very, very strongly to small things that people say.”
In seeking to preserve its autonomy and yet maintain the US special relationship, Maddox said the UK had to be willing to differ publicly, urging Keir Starmer to make an explicit stand in the defence of the BBC, for instance.
Trump has mounted a $10bn defamation lawsuit against the broadcaster, claiming it damaged his reputation by splicing together two sections of his address to a rally on 6 January 2021, which it is alleged gave the impression he encouraged supporters to storm the Capitol building in Washington DC.
Maddox said: “Sometimes lines have to be drawn. Whatever you think of the BBC, the president of the US is launching a personal lawsuit which at the very least could impoverish and disrupt a citizen-funded national institution, which the prime minister needs explicitly to defend.”
She added: “US efforts to challenge UK laws governing social media appear to equate US interests with those of the US tech giants.” She said not enough was “made of the monetisation of the presidency, a threat to the reputation of US institutions”.
Maddox also urged Starmer ahead of his imminent visit to China to take a tougher stance. She did not challenge China’s plans for a new embassy at Royal Mint close to the City of London – a plan that still requires government planning consent – but she pressed Starmer to question why China needed such a large diplomatic representation in the UK.
She also said the imminent decision on whether to give permission for China to provide technology for UK wind turbines was being underplayed since it would provide China with an off switch and an enormous amount of information about UK energy consumption. She also urged Labour to make decisions about the dependence on Chinese students to finance British universities.
Maddox argued that as international law and global order unravelled, there was a need to look for regional blocs to step forward as sources of order. Lots of countries were going to have to spend more in their own self-interest on their defence, and to work out quite quickly where they could find fellow travellers. “This is not a recipe for saying the rest of the world can bypass the US. It’s about finding lots of ‘coalitions of the willing’ built around common interests,” she said.
She warned: “China is certain to try to offer to fill the vacuum created by Trump, as well as appropriate the precedent set in Venezuela. It will say ‘we want global governance, the rule of law and for the United Nations to work’. It will make a play for the high moral ground, but it does not regard Taiwan as an issue of international law since this is an internal issue.”
