Paddy Ashdown has been speaking to PoliticsHome about the development of UK foreign policy in the age of Trump and how the US President’s unpredictable actions have an unsettling impact on the world.

“It does not mean that the Atlantic axis is going to be less important, but it ceases to be our primary axis on which to base our defence and probably our foreign policy as well.”

“That relationship must be much more mature, where both sides realise that there will be times when their interests in the world diverge,” he explains, citing US policy on Iran and Israel as two examples.

Beyond these ‘differing interests’ Ashdown presses the Government to  distance itself from the “irrational” Trump approach on “tinder pile” issues like North Korea.

He says the Trump tactic – of mocking and baiting Kim Jong Un on Twitter, alongside battle-cry threats of “fire and fury” – simply creates a space for North Korea to drive a wedge between Washington and Seoul, as shown by its offer of talks and participation in the upcoming winter Olympics in South Korea.

“We are used to a US president who is careful, thoughtful, intelligent and well informed, and we don’t have that now at the moment at all,” Ashdown laments.

“I can see five piles of tinder around the world, any one of which through inadvertence, stupidity or just blundering could be set alight… any one of which could have the capacity to ignite a much wider conflagration. And you want somebody blundering around the world, firing off tweets? In these very difficult circumstances I don’t think that’s the way to make a safer world. In a world as fragile, turbulent and close to war on several fronts as ours, I don’t think that’s a balanced and wise strategy.”

Ashdown berates Theresa May for getting into bed with the US president too quickly when she went to Washington a year ago, holding his hand on the White House grounds and offering him a state visit to Britain with all the trimmings. He says those who “took seriously the idea that Mr Trump was genuinely going to be producing a great trade deal” for Britain after Brexit were “really clinging to every straw on the Government side”. Damningly, he says he would not be surprised if the quality of that hoped-for trade deal is in fact affected by the shelving of the state visit plans. “I don’t think it’s at all beyond the expectation one has of Mr Trump’s actions that he will actually give us a bad trade deal particularly because he hasn’t had a state visit or a state banquet,” the peer predicts. “I think that’s what we are getting to.”

You can read the whole interview here.

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