THERESA May is pandering to Donald Trump, who has made the world a more dangerous place, Jeremy Corbyn has said.

At a major speech outlining Labour’s foreign and defence policy he warned the Prime Minister was seeking to “build a coalition of risk and insecurity” with the US President.

Speaking to an audience of foreign policy experts at the Chatham House thinktank in London he referred to May’s visit to Trump shortly after his inauguration earlier this year.

“Waiting to see which way the wind blows in Washington isn’t strong leadership. And pandering to an erratic administration will not deliver stability,” he said.

“Britain deserves better than simply outsourcing our country’s security and prosperity to the whims of the Trump White House. So no more hand-holding with Donald Trump. A Labour government will conduct a robust and independent foreign policy made in Britain.”

He said the “war on terror”, pursued by the west since the 1990s, had not succeeded and had in fact made brought increased security risks to Britain.

Instead the Labour leader said he would review UK airstrikes against Daesh in Syria and Iraq and seek to build a foreign policy based on peace and diplomacy.

“Today the world is more unstable than even at the height of the Cold War. The approach to international security we have been using since the 1990s simply has not worked,” he said.

“Regime change wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria – and Western interventions in Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen – haven’t always succeeded in their own terms. Sometimes they have made the world a more dangerous place.”

But despite his long record as an anti-war campaigner, the Labour leader said he was not a pacifist and said there are circumstances, such as World War II, when military intervention is justified.

The Labour leader, who has previously made clear he would never authorise the use of Britain’s nuclear weapons, said that if it ever were to emerge as a “real option” it would represent a “cataclysmic failure” by world leaders.

“I am often asked if as prime minister I would order the use of nuclear weapons,” he said.

“It’s an extraordinary question when you think about it: would you order the indiscriminate killing of millions of people? Would you risk such extensive contamination of the planet that no life could exist across large parts of the world?

“If circumstances arose where that was a real option, it would represent complete and cataclysmic failure. It would mean world leaders had already triggered a spiral of catastrophe for humankind.”

Corbyn said that in office, Labour would work to halt the “drift to conflict” with Russia while maintaining its opposition to human rights abuses by Moscow.

“There is no need whatever to weaken our opposition to Russia’s human rights abuses at home or abroad to understand the necessity of winding down tensions on the Russia-Nato border and supporting dialogue to reduce the risk of international conflict,” he said.

He said Labour would retain the commitment to the Nato target of spending two per cent of GDP on defence, and strongly criticised the Conservatives’ record on the armed forces.

“They have balanced the books on the backs of servicemen and women. Deep cuts have seen the Army reduced to its smallest size since the Napoleonic Wars,” he said.

“From stagnant pay and worsening conditions to poor housing, the morale of our service personnel and veterans is at rock bottom.”

The Prime Minister shot back highlighting the leak earlier this week of the draft of Labour’s General Election manifesto which she said was a “multibillion-pound ideological wish list” with a funding shortfall estimated to be “at least £30 billion”.