It has become cliché to say that the advent of the second Trump administration has thrown the world into chaos. Just look at what we are told around the clock by experts, opinion makers, the media and pretty much anyone with a view on the matter. They are all competing in hyperbolic language to describe the state of the world. We hear of convulsions, tectonic changes, epochal transformations, mayhem and disarray in foreign affairs – all, of course, stemming from the White House’s new policies which are almost universally being described as “destructive” and “destabilising”. 

In the shaken telling of much of the Trans-Atlantic community, the revised direction of US foreign policy presages unmitigated catastrophes. Ukraine is being thrown under the bus, we are told; Canada and Greenland are being targeted for US conquest; Europe is suddenly left at best defenceless, at worst a prey for both Trump’s and Putin’s equally-wicked quests for dominance. The tariffs are seen as almost akin to a declaration of war. Indeed, in the view of many sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome, America has transformed overnight from the continent’s key ally and security guarantor into its whip-wielding master, even enemy. 

No wonder that nerves have snapped, even amongst the smartest, most cerebral and sensible of European and British observers, for whom total calamity is at hand and defence spending must – must! – be doubled or tripled if we are to stand a chance at avoiding some kind of “1930s”-something. As noted in these pages before, the very fact that “the 1930s” keeps recurring in our debates as, apparently, one of the only historical references for an otherwise largely strategically-illiterate “expert” class (see the West’s global strategic track record post-1992), gives the measure of just how low the conversation has fallen.