The world is a more uncertain place today than it has been for decades. We now face a period of renewed – and unexpected – confrontation between the United States and Russia, a civil war in Syria that seems only to be getting worse, and a renewed threat of nuclear sabre-rattling in North Korea.

And all of this at a time when the UK is struggling to come to terms with what it means both for Donald Trump to be in the White House, and for Britain to be out of the EU.

When I think of every new US president over the past 30 years, the concern has always been how close they will want to be to Britain. But when I look at Trump, the real question is: how close do we want to be to him?

Does it mean the risk of getting sucked into another reckless war in the Middle East, at a time when the lessons of Iraq and Libya mean that we ought to know better?

Does it mean a return to the kind of go-it-alone, shoot-from-the-hip unilateralism in the US, which we thought had been left behind with the Bush administration?

Does it mean cosying up to climate change deniers? Or scrapping the nuclear Iran deal? Or for that matter, a new nuclear arms race between the superpowers?

If it means any of those, then the postwar era of Britain and America operating in lockstep on foreign policy will be in severe jeopardy.

Of course, some will argue that when we are losing one anchor of diplomatic stability because of Brexit, the last thing we can afford is to lose the other by letting the special relationship crumble.

But we must not forget that our historic ties to America have always been built on our shared values and mutual respect. We should also understand that in the age of Trump, blind loyalty is unlikely to earn us the respect we will need to have a realistic chance of influencing policy in Washington.

MORE:   https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/13/blind-loyalty-trump-special-relationship-britain-foreign-policy