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

Donald Trump and Keir Starmer at Chequers last September. ‘We have seen in so many ways how the Trump administration can react very, very strongly to small things that people say,’ Bronwen Maddox said. Photograph: Leon Neal/Reuters

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.”