Former MI6 Chief on Trump, the War in Ukraine and Dealing With China 

EXPERT INTERVIEW — As a new year begins, with a long list of threats and global security challenges looming, we offer a view of those challenges from someone with a unique vantage point: the former head of the British intelligence service MI6, Sir Alex Younger. Younger also offers advice to the incoming Trump administration – along with a blend of praise and harsh criticism of what the President-elect has pledged to do when he takes office in less than three weeks.

Younger, who served as MI6 chief from 2014 to 2022, told The Cipher Brief that he fears that the U.S. hasn’t yet come to terms with the implications of the fact that, as he puts it, the “unipolar moment is over” – meaning the era in which global norms were set by the U.S. and its allies.