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IMPACT UPDATE: Byline Times investigations have forced the suspension of two Conservative local election candidates after revealing their far-right extremist posts, and our investigation into Reform’s connections to THE COMPANY JCB cited by the Guardian. 05/05/26
Alan Mendoza, Reform UK’s Chief Advisor on Global Affairs, co-hosted a private meeting at which the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute distributed material endorsing US President Donald Trump’s plan to seize Greenland from NATO ally Denmark, Byline Times can reveal.
The same think-tank has promoted Trump’s tariff policies and 2020 election denial conspiracy theories.
Three months into Mendoza’s tenure at Reform UK, he hosted a Reagan-Jackson Security Dialogue at the Cambridge Union on 18 and 19 February 2026. The private gathering brought together serving British military leadership, Conservative MPs and peers, and Trump administration envoys.
The US Department of State also funded hotel accommodation in Cambridge for the visiting senators and their senior staff.
In the four months before the Cambridge dialogue, the Reagan Foundation hosted Eric Trump to promote a book denying his father’s loss of the 2020 presidential election, and publicly intervened to support Donald Trump’s tariffs against US allies.
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The Greenland Doctrine
At the Reagan-Jackson Security dialogue, the Foundation’s latest doctrinal volume endorsed Trump’s proposal to seize Denmark’s Greenland.
The volume, The Future of Conservative Internationalism, Volume VI, contains an essay by Alexander Gray – the Deputy Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff of the White House National Security Council in the first Trump term – promoting US military annexation of a NATO ally.
Gray’s essay, titled “The Trump Administration’s Foreign Policy Goals: A Hemispheric Defence of US Interests”, described acquiring Greenland as an “absolute necessity” for US national security. It argued that a “compact of free association” with the United States is a “less confrontational approach to securing US interests”.
Greenland is a self-governing territory of Denmark, a founding NATO member and treaty ally of the United Kingdom and the United States.
Gray claimed that under US sovereignty, Greenland would gain greater autonomy and Washington would gain “unfettered US military access”, alongside the ability to deny other foreign powers the ability to operate nearby. The essay ignored the fact the US military already has full operational authority over in Greenland under its 1951 existing treaty framework.
Greenland’s population has consistently rejected US acquisition, and the Danish Government had described Trump’s designs on the territory as unacceptable.
On Panama, Gray defended Trump’s refusal to rule out military or economic coercion as a legitimate negotiating tactic to “pressure Panama into aligning more closely with US interests”.
Gray cited the Second World War precedent of “hemispheric defence”, when the United States occupied Greenland and assumed control of British naval bases in the Caribbean, as precedent for Trump’s “modern reinterpretation of the Monroe Doctrine”.
Following his previous White House stint, Gray became strategic counsellor at Ballard Partners, the lobbying firm closest to the Trump White House.
Alan Mendoza is the executive director of the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), which co-produced the event with the Reagan Foundation. In November 2025, he left the Conservative Party to become Reform UK’s chief foreign policy advisor, keeping his HJS role.
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The Reagan Foundation
The volume distributed at Cambridge is the sixth in the Reagan Foundation Strategy Group’s annual series, and its flagship doctrinal project. Its editors – Rachel Hoff, the Institute’s Policy Director, and Thomas Kenna, its Associate Director of Policy – attended the dialogue convened by Mendoza.
The ‘conservative internationalism’ label is borrowed from Henry Nau, the George Washington University political scientist who, according to the Reagan Foundation, defined it as doctrine that backs “the expansion of freedom through the use of military force”.
The Reagan Foundation had moved into the orbit of Trumpism well before Cambridge. On 19 October 2025, it hosted Eric Trump, Executive Vice President of the Trump Organisation, to promote his book Under Siege.
During the discussion, Eric Trump told the audience his father had won the 2020 presidential election – a claim rejected by US courts, Trump’s own former Attorney General William Barr, and the bipartisan certification of the result. He also dismissed Donald Trump’s New York jury conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records as a fabrication, describing the criminal investigations as the work of a “deep state” conspiracy.
Days later, the Reagan Foundation publicly supported Trump’s global tariff offensive. The trigger was an Ontario government ad campaign that quoted Ronald Reagan’s 1987 speech warning against tariffs and trade wars – Reagan in his own voice, on television, saying what Reagan had always said. The Reagan Foundation accused Ontario of misrepresenting Reagan’s words and threatened legal action.
President Trump cited the intervention as proof that Reagan had supported tariffs, and used it to justify cutting off trade negotiations with Canada. CNN’s analysis was that the Foundation “did Trump a solid on tariffs – at the expense of Reagan’s ideals.”
The British economy and wider Europe have faced significant fallout from Trump’s tariffs, undermining an already deeply fragile financial situation and further impacting the slowdown in GDP growth.
Reform’s Plans to Import Trump’s Authoritarian ‘Project 2025’ Blueprint to the UK
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The UK Defence Establishment
Both keynotes at the Cambridge dialoguecame from senior British generals. The opening went to General Sir Jim Hockenhull – the serving Commander of UK Cyber and Specialist Operations Command, and former Chief of Defence Intelligence. The closing went to General Sir Richard Barrons, one of the leaders of the 2025 UK Strategic Defence Review.
Sir Julian Lewis MP – the only parliamentarian to have ever chaired both the Intelligence and Security Committee and the Defence Select Committee – sat on the opening panel on the new US National Security Strategy. John Foreman, the former UK Defence Attaché in Moscow during the run-up to the 2022 Ukraine invasion, sat on the Ukraine panel.
The event also included heavy engagement from senior Conservative politicians. The opening panel was moderated by Sir Brandon Lewis – former Northern Ireland Secretary, Conservative Party Chairman and Lord Chancellor, a sitting HJS trustee.
Sir David Davis MP, the former Brexit Secretary, joined the panel on AI and information warfare alongside Viscount Camrose, Tory Shadow Minister for Science, Innovation and Technology.
Dame Karen Pierce, Boris Johnson’s Ambassador to the United States until earlier 2025, sat on the Mendoza-moderated Middle East panel.
In addition to Mendoza, Rear Admiral Chris Parry, listed in the conference programme as a Reform UK mayoral candidate, made an appearance.
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A Trump-aligned anti-abortion lobbyist who hosted Nigel Farage’s meeting with a 6 January rioter in Florida has been funding and advising the Reform leader while pushing Project 2025’s hard-right agenda into Britain
The American Delegation
The American delegation drew from across the second Trump administration’s foreign policy network – serving officials, recent alumni, sitting senators, House members, and senior pro-Trump commentators.
Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, Trump’s former Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia and named author of the administration’s peace plan, took the Ukraine panel.
Alex Wong, until recently Trump’s Principal Deputy National Security Advisor and now Hanwha Group’s Global Chief Strategy Officer, took the China and Taiwan panel.
Mac Thornberry, former Republican Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, joined the panel on AI and information warfare. Marc Thiessen, the Washington Post columnist and former chief speechwriter to George W. Bush, sat on the opening panel.
Roger Zakheim, the Reagan Institute’s Director and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, brought the US Congressional delegation to Cambridge directly from the Munich Security Conference. The delegation included two senators and six members of the House of Representatives.
The Mendoza event was organised with some financial support from the Trump administration, with the US State Department covering accommodation expense for the senators’ and senior staff.
Reform UK, Alan Mendoza and the Henry Jackson Society did not respond to requests for comment.