British ambassador to Washington says US president has sounded ‘wake-up call to the international old guard’
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.”
