End of western alliance means UK must be bolder, says Chatham House director | Foreign policy

Donald Trump requires Britain to adopt a bolder, more independent foreign policy against the US and China and ends the Western alliance, the director of Britain’s most prestigious foreign policy think tank has said.

Bronwen Maddox, director of Chatham House, said in her analysis at its annual conference: “The risk of remaining silent and not challenging the principles that undergird the liberal international order is that those principles will become an article of history, not the foundation of the world we want to live in.”

He added: “The UK has carried out a balancing act with some agility, but it has reached a point where it is difficult to discern policy.”

Maddox called Trump’s impulsiveness, fondness for military action and rejection of international law a revolution. He said the United States’ allies “must now consider the unthinkable: defending themselves against the United States, both in terms of trade and security.”

“It is not an exaggeration to call this the end of the Western alliance,” he said, meaning countries that “share at heart the principles of individual freedom, intellectual and religious freedom, constitutional democracy and free trade.” These principles are “the engine of their prosperity as well as the logic of their global impact,” Maddox said.

He said that in recent months we have seen “the rejection of the principles of international law that the United States helped establish, even as it often refuses to apply them to itself.”

“Venezuela is the latest example of this,” Maddox said. “Trump’s intention to seize Greenland is contrary to the UN charter and the ban on seizing territory by force. If he does so by force, as his team threatens, this will be the end of NATO.”

In an interview with the Guardian, Maddox said one of Chatham House’s tasks would be to advocate for the need for new alliances and agreements in which countries defend the principles that the superpowers have torn apart.

“I understand the inevitable pragmatism of the UK government, but at some point you have to stand up and say that we have these differences in principle and we get a pretty big list,” he said.

“The UK, like Europe, faces a big dilemma. It wants two big things from America. One is trade, and the other is help on defense, including support for Ukraine. The Prime Minister doesn’t want to jeopardize those two. We’ve seen in many ways how the Trump administration, including the president, can react very, very strongly to the little things people say.”

Maddox said Britain, which wants to maintain its special relationship with the US while maintaining its autonomy, must clearly be willing to act differently, and called on Keir Starmer, for example, to take a clear stance in defense of the BBC.

Trump filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the broadcaster, alleging that he stitched together two parts of a speech he gave at a rally on January 6, 2021, to make it appear that he encouraged his supporters to attack the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

Maddox said: “Sometimes lines have to be drawn. Whatever you think of the BBC, the US president is launching a personal cause that could at the very least impoverish and cripple a citizen-funded national institution that the prime minister should be publicly defending.”

He added: “US efforts to challenge UK laws regulating social media appear to equate US interests with those of US tech giants.” He said it was not enough for “the presidency to make money pose a threat to the reputation of U.S. institutions.”

Maddox also called on Starmer to take a tougher stance ahead of his visit to China. He did not oppose China’s plans to establish a new embassy at the Royal Mint near the City of London (a plan that still requires government planning permission), but he pressed Starmer to question why China needs such a large diplomatic representation in the UK.

He also said an imminent decision on whether China would be allowed to supply technology for UK wind turbines was not being considered as it would give China an off switch and a huge amount of information about the UK’s energy consumption. He also called on Labor to make decisions about dependence on Chinese students to fund British universities.

Maddox argued that as international law and global order dissolve, regional blocs should be sought to come to the fore as the source of order. Many countries would have to spend more on their defense in their own interests and would try to find where they could find comrades fairly quickly. “This is not a prescription to say the rest of the world can bypass the United States. It’s about finding multiple ‘coalitions of the willing’ built around common interests,” he said.

He warned: “China will certainly seek to conform to precedents in Venezuela, as well as offering to fill the vacuum created by Trump. It will say, ‘We want global governance, the rule of law, and the United Nations to work.’ It will make a play for the moral high ground, but it does not consider Taiwan a matter of international law because it is an internal matter.”