Laurel Rapp: ‘there’s No Going Back To The America Of The Past Decade’

Laurel Rapp: ‘There’s no going back to the America of the past decade’ The World Today iallan.drupal 8 June 2026

The director of Chatham House’s US and North America programme on why the 250th anniversary of US independence is likely to further polarize Americans.

What was your path to a career in international affairs?

I grew up in a small town outside New York City, and found myself drawn to the world beyond the United States. After working as a researcher on political participation in Morocco for a year, I decided I wanted to be a diplomat. I spent the 14 years before I joined Chatham House at the US State Department, mostly in Washington, focused on America’s role in the Middle East and its approach to the United Nations.

My first job in the State Department was during the Arab Spring as the sole expert on Bahrain, where the US has its largest naval base in the Middle East. My role was to help the US navigate this tumultuous moment. Trying to find the balance between human rights and security interests was difficult and a fascinating introduction to the hard trade-offs policymakers must weigh up.

At Chatham House, I look at how US and Canadian foreign policy is shaped from the outside, and how it affects people in the UK and globally. The topics are similar, but at the State Department I was working on shorter timelines under crises and focused on behind-the-scenes coordination between the White House, Pentagon and the intelligence community. Now I have a much more public-facing role, which is exciting.

As an American in Britain, how do you see the state of the US relationship with Europe?

I have rich conversations here in London about the direction of the US under this administration and beyond. Many are about whether this is just a moment in US foreign policy driven by who is in the White House, or a more deeply animated set of American interests and values that the US public, businesses and civil society want to see.

We don’t know where American voters are going to land on this question, but we’ll get a sense during the midterm elections in November. My view is that there’s no going back to what existed in the past decade, or even the last couple of years. A lot of trust in the steadiness and the predictability of the US has been eroded, and it isn’t something that you can rebuild overnight. Whoever takes office next will set a new US foreign policy direction, and right now Americans are trying to define that vision. 

It won’t be what it was before, but there is so much that connects the US and Europe that gives me optimism for the future. For the past decade the US has been pushing Europe to shoulder a greater defence burden, and Europe is getting the message and seeing mutual benefit in the approach.