UK Ambassador Calls for US-UK Tech Alliance to Counter Chinese Dominance in AI and Quantum Computing

Mandelson warns US and UK must unite to halt Chinese tech supremacy

A new US-UK technology partnership is essential to stopping China from achieving technological dominance over the west in crucial fields such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing and biotechnology, the UK's ambassador to the US has warned. Lord Peter Mandelson said that if China won the race for technological supremacy in the coming decades it would affect "every facet of our lives". He compared a planned tech pact with the US to the cold war treaties that created the London's uniquely close security ties to Washington. "Only America has the capability, wealth and determination to compete with China technologically," he said in a lecture on the future of the UK's post-Brexit relationship with America on Saturday. He added that the US and UK must "must combine the formidable assets at our joint disposal" to win the race against Beijing. Mandelson, a Labour grandee appointed as ambassador to Washington by UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer last December, set out a stark vision of America "locked in a strategic rivalry" with China, a country he described as "the most formidable modern competitor" the west has ever encountered. London is hoping to sign a memorandum of understanding with Washington on a technology partnership when US President Donald Trump embarks on a three-day state visit to the UK this month. Few details are available, but officials said the pact would create "complementary partnerships" across AI, quantum computing, defence innovation and civil nuclear energy that would be needed to power advanced computing economies. Mandelson said the envisaged partnership should become as significant as the 1958 Mutual Defence Agreements that were spurred by the Soviet Union launching its Sputnik satellite and the subsequent nuclear agreements that Harold Macmillan negotiated with John F Kennedy. "The choice before us is stark and urgent," Mandelson told an audience at Ditchley Park, the Oxfordshire-based foundation for transatlantic relations. "The Atlantic alliance must evolve to meet the greatest challenge of our age: keeping ahead in the global technology race." Britain became the first country to sign a "liberation day" tariff reduction deal with Trump in May, which offered discounts to tariffs on cars and steel, on the condition that the UK met "US requirements" to exclude China from strategic supply chains. Mandelson did not provide details of whether a technology partnership with the US would also come with demands to follow the US lead in excluding China from technologies such as autonomous vehicles and mobile telecommunications. UK government officials said that Mandelson's binary approach to the tech race against Beijing was compatible with the government's desire to "collaborate" with China in non-sensitive areas, while "contesting and competing" in strategic sectors. However, Starmer faces an imminent test of where the line should be drawn. A decision looms over whether the UK should allow one of China's largest wind turbine makers to supply North Sea wind farms -- a deal the Trump administration has raised concerns about. Mandelson also indicated that the UK must use its Brexit freedoms to embrace a more liberal, US-style approach to tech regulation and not allow future technologies to be "stifled with excessive regulation", such as the EU's data protection regulations and AI Act. The Trump administration has threatened the EU and UK with tariffs if they do not loosen their tech taxes and online regulations. But Mandelson said that while Brexit had left Britain economically "squeezed" between the world's three great regulatory blocs -- the US, the EU and China -- it had also fundamentally "altered our geopolitical options". "Brexit has freed us to pursue closer US ties," he added, arguing that predictions that Brexit would leave the UK with less clout in Washington had "turned out to be false". Having been sent to Washington to charm Trump, Mandelson said that it was possible to be "respectful without being sycophantic". He praised the US president for his efforts to resolve conflicts in Ukraine and cited his interventions in "multiple spheres of conflict" as evidence that Trump was not as "indifferent to the world" as sometimes portrayed. He concluded that Trump, for all his mercurial style, was not responsible -- as was often claimed -- for shattering the postwar order, but was rather "more consequence than cause" of a geopolitical upheaval that has been under way for some time. "He will not always get everything right but with his Sharpie pen and freewheeling Oval Office press sprays he has sounded a deafening wake-up call to the international old guard," he said.

Peter Mandelson lauds Trump as 'risk-taker' in call for US-UK tech alliance

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." 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'. "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."