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Donald Trump is a risk-taker sounding a necessary wake-up call to a stale status quo, Peter Mandelson has told the Ditchley Foundation in a speech before Trump’s second state visit to the UK this month.
The UK’s ambassador to Washington portrayed Trump as a harbinger of a new force in politics at a time when business as usual no longer works for fed-up voters.
The bulk of the speech was focused on a call for a US-UK technology partnership covering AI, quantum computing and rare-earth minerals as part of efforts to win a competition with China that Lord Mandelson said would shape this century.
He said that such a partnership with the US had the potential to be as important as the security relationship the US and UK forged in the second world war, adding: “If China wins the race for technological dominance in the coming decades, every facet of our lives is going to be affected.”
The first steps to that partnership are likely to be unveiled during Trump’s state visit, including new commitments for cheap nuclear energy to power the AI revolution.
Mandelson, although a fierce pro-European, also said Brexit had not made the UK less relevant to the US, but by freeing the UK from European regulatory burdens had made Britain a more attractive site for US investors.
Critics of Mandelson’s interpretation of Trump’s populism will argue that it assumes a set of common values between Trump’s Maga movement and European liberal democracy that is fading.
In his pitch for a close US-UK alliance, he made no mention of key points of difference including Gaza, the international rule of law, Trump’s inability to see that Vladimir Putin is stalling in Ukraine, or Trump’s creeping domestic authoritarianism.
Insisting he was not cast in the role of Trump’s “explainer-in-chief” and denying there was any need to be sycophantic with the Trump team, he praised the US president for identifying the anxieties gripping millions of impatient voters deprived of meaningful work.
He accused those arguing for a pivot away from Trump’s America of “lazy thinking”, arguing that the America First credo on the climate crisis, US aid cuts and trade did not preclude a close partnership.
He said: “The president may not follow the traditional rulebook or conventional practice, but he is a risk-taker in a world where a ‘business as usual’ approach no longer works.
“Indeed, he seems to have an ironclad stomach for political risk, both at home and abroad – convening other nations and intervening in conflicts that other presidents would have thought endlessly about before descending into an analysis paralysis and gradual incrementalism.
“Yet – and this is not well understood – although the Trumpian national security strategy is called ‘America First’, it does not actually mean ‘America Alone’.
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“We see him leverage America’s heft to put the right people in the room and hammer out compromises in order to grind out concessions.
“I am not just thinking of Ukraine where the president has brought fresh energy to efforts to end Putin’s brutal invasion and bring peace to that region. If the president were so indifferent to the rest of the world, if he was so in love with America alone, he would not have intervened in multiple spheres of conflict over the last seven months.
“Furthermore, the ‘international order’ people claim he has disrupted and the calm he has allegedly shattered was already at breaking point. So, I would argue that Trump is more consequence than cause of the upheaval we are experiencing.”
He continued: “He will not always get everything right but with his Sharpie pen and freewheeling Oval Office media sprays he has sounded a deafening wake-up call to the international old guard.
“And the president is right about the status quo failing from America’s point of view. The world has rested on the willingness of the US to act as sheriff, to form a posse whenever anything went wrong, a world in which America’s allies could fall in behind – not always that close behind either – and then allow the US to do most of the heavy lifting.”
Going further than the UK’s official line, he praised Trump’s military attack on Iran, saying: “Trump understands the positive coercive power of traditional American deterrence, deterring adversaries through a blend of strength and strategic unpredictability, as we saw in his decisive action on Iran’s nuclear programme. Well beyond their military impact, these strikes gave a swathe of malign foreign regimes pause for thought.”
