I may, in the past, have said and written things about Donald Trump that were open to misinterpretation as tokens of approval. It is certainly true that I have taken to task those who froth at the mouth in their eagerness to condemn him, blind to the shortcomings of his rivals, and unwilling, when faced with the many aspects of his world view that amount to nothing more than a return to common sense, to give the Devil his due. However, my attitude to his ascendancy has always been that his very existence as a serious political force is entirely, and lamentably, the fault of a liberal establishment which spent twenty years taking leave of its senses. I have argued, I hope, for nuance.

However, there can be nothing nuanced about the response to Trump’s Ukraine démarche. In a few days, he has damaged America’s brand incalculably, emboldened America’s most dangerous adversary, China, and thereby set the conditions for decades of conflict and quite possibly open warfare. He may also, in the longer run, have set a course for his own nation’s irreversible decline.

Continuing a trajectory that began in 1975 with the withdrawal from Vietnam, the first two decades of the 21st century have seen a rapid decline in the credibility of American deterrence, in the face of a growing threat posed by China. The great strategic task of an American president in the third decade of the century ought to have been to restore it. Opportunities to diminish deterrent credibility are abundant, and Team Biden took any that came its way – most notably, the catastrophically mishandled withdrawal from Afghanistan. Restoring one’s deterrent credibility, on the other hand, is a much trickier affair. It almost unavoidably entails becoming involved in a fighting war, and winning it. Picking fights, even with gold-plated baddies like Saddam Hussein, seems to be widely frowned upon these days. What you need then, if you’re a president in 2022, properly apprised of his country’s long-term interests, is someone else’s war – one started by another gold-plated baddy, against a goody ruling with a democratic mandate. A war, moreover, that can be fought and won by the goody’s expert army, provided it has unqualified American support in all but boots on the ground.

Trouble is, a war that ticks all those boxes doesn’t come along every day. But wait – what’s that I hear you say? It’s February 2022, and Vladimir Putin’s just invaded Ukraine, a country whose sovereignty we promised, back in 1994, to protect, as a quid pro quo for surrendering its nukes? A country clearly intent on aligning itself with our social values, and governed by a president with a genuinely democratic mandate? Perfect- thanks, Vlad. Thanks, for that matter, Ukraine!

Sleepy Joe, scared that Hunter’s laptop might have a counterpart in Kiev, and that its contents might become public, gave the Ukrainians enough to forfend defeat, but his heart wasn’t in it, and it was never enough to deliver the drubbing to Putin he so richly deserved. Worse than that, he (or rather his team, because as we know he was by that time a cognitively vacant sock puppet) kept reminding Putin how anxious the US was to avoid ‘escalation’, and thereby reassuring him that provided he was prepared – as he is – to lose unlimited numbers of his own people, his war of meat-grinding attrition would succeed in the end.

But to Biden’s successor, the opportunity to go down in history as the man who saved plucky little Ukraine, and by extension put all the tyrants by whom the West is now threatened back in their boxes for a generation, all without putting American boys in harm’s way should have been catnip. Have Xi Jin Ping watch him whip Putin like the cur he is, let his own people take care of him in the time-honoured fashion with which Russia disposes of its failed leaders, spend his embargoed funds on Ukrainian reconstruction, and for a few hundred billion, he takes care of the entire Pacific/China problem without firing a shot. And if that sounds expensive, it’s chump change compared to the cost of fighting China for real.

And yet here we are. Trump has chosen to align himself with a reviled dictator, and against, not just America’s traditional allies, underserving though they undoubtedly are, but the wiser heads in his own party.

The US has, since 1945, enjoyed the enormous advantage of owning the world’s reserve currency, and in consequence being able to incur a debt burden so staggering that it would cripple a lesser power. That has always been worth paying a price for, in terms of military expenditure disproportionate to that of its dependent allies. We can argue about the extent of that price, but not about the fundamental principle underlying it. By effectively tearing up that compact, Trump is forcing European states to look to their own defence. From the point of view of US interests, that may be fine, so long as all its bets pay off. But just how sound are those bets?

One of the many predicates of the Trump position appears to be an assumption of Russian ascendancy on the Ukrainian battlefield which, like much else that he’s been spouting, owes more than it ought to Russian propaganda, swallowed whole. There is good evidence that the Russians are in fact doing it tough. You don’t use Lada 4x4s in combat zones when you’re flushed with success and abundant resources. There is also reason to believe that the Russian economy is in a parlous state.

So, imagine for a second that Ukraine rejects the peace deal it is offered, that Europe pulls itself together with a monumental, all-stops-out effort, and that Ukraine manages to fight Russia, if not to defeat, then at least to a standstill. And imagine that that culmination coincides with a severe economic crisis in Russia, made worse by the fact that Europe has finally got round to confiscating the Russian reserves it holds sequestered, and applied them to winning the war and patching up Ukraine’s damaged fabric. Now, I don’t suggest this is the likely outcome, but it, or something like it, is surely a non-negligible possibility. Where would that leave the US?

The post-1945 compact is irreparably broken. Whatever Trump imagines he will replace it with (and I have yet to see that coherently articulated), it surely has at its core the idea that the US, and especially its president, should be teamed with winners. And if Trump’s winner, Putin, is revealed as a loser, in Trumpian terms that will make him a loser too.

Meanwhile Europe will have transformed its military establishment into something resembling a credible independent deterrent (hint – ditch every single Net Zero policy forthwith, and spend the money, and the resulting economic growth on guns – you will still need more money, but you’ll find it much cheaper to borrow when the markets see that you have stopped committing economic suicide). In such circumstances, instead of being the world’s pre-eminent superpower, the US becomes just another great power, albeit a very great one indeed. It will have lost most of its moral authority, and its erstwhile European allies will no longer be dependent on it.

For a president whose freedom to act is constrained by his own Congress in ways that we in the rest of the world tend to forget, he is accumulating adversaries in numbers which would alarm a politician less prey to insouciant egotism.

Whether Trump is made to pay for his folly depends in the immediate sense on the ability of the leaders of the key European states to agree among themselves to resolute action. Past precedent offers little comfort in this regard, but his own Vice- President has just riled them with a rebuke which, while it was well-deserved, might be expected to provoke them to displays of virtue at just the time when his gambit needs them to maintain their customary lack of resolve.

Trump’s stunning electoral success (ironically, like that of Keir Starmer) owes little to heartfelt love of him and what he represents. A key component of his vote came from people who loved what he did to the people they hate, and were prepared to hold their noses and vote for him, as a way of punishing them. Many of those voters, along with their representatives in the Senate and Congress, must now be horrified to see him embracing Putin, and more than ready to make his life difficult. Furthermore, it tends to be forgotten that support for Ukraine has not come only from Europe and the US, but from Japan, South Korea, Australia and a variety of countries alarmed at the precedent that might be set in Chinese eyes by an easy victory gained by an unprovoked invasion by an invading tyrant. Inside and outside the US, therefore, elements of opposition to a Trumpian sell-out of Ukraine exist which, while individually small could, with sufficient will, amount to a coalition capable of sidelining the US and, at the very least, putting victory permanently beyond Putin’s reach. If any of this comes to pass, Trump will have achieved the disengagement from Europe that he seems to have wished for. But in the longer run, he may find that the supremacy of the almighty dollar depended more than he imagined upon the US having, taking care of, and sometimes indulging friendly dependents.

Trump, the great deal-maker, appears to me to have made the worst deal of his career. But then, what would I know?
Tom Forrester-Paton