For Trump, the Venezuela scenario presents significant intertwined problems. Firstly, his officials must come up with “stabilization” policies to rebuild, or at least patch up, the country’s horribly decayed public services — the result of years of thievery and neglect. Secondly, he must persuade his own followers, who are devoted to the credo of “America First”, that what is going on is not, repeat not, “nation-building” — the infamous military malpractice that ensured the very expensive US defeat in the Vietnam War and, decades later, in Afghanistan.

By stating that Venezuela’s notoriously hardline vice-president would remain in place to rule in place of Maduro, implicitly over an unchanged government, Trump was signaling to his alarmed followers that he was not seeking “regime change” and that the US would not start spending billions to build the government of a new and democratic Venezuela. The only spending that he has so far mentioned is the investment of US oil companies to rehabilitate Venezuela’s long-neglected oil fields and increase their output and profitability.

I was frankly surprised to hear Trump talk of Venezuela’s “immense” oil reserves, rhetoric which not only provides ammunition to anti-American propagandists, but which is also factually wrong. As everybody in the trade has long known, those reserves are only “immense” for practical purposes if the country’s very heavy oil can be extracted — and given that huge investments are necessary to do that, the reserves cannot be profitable unless oil prices rise far above current, or even remotely probable, levels.

As things currently stand, Venezuela can only produce one million barrels a day of oil. If its petroleum infrastructure is rehabilitated, it could quickly double its production. Then, with more investment, it could double it again to four million barrels a day, the level of Iran and Iraq, not of Saudi Arabia, the US or Russia.

Trump’s restraint in letting the regime continue essentially as is — but for an end to its logistic support of Colombian drug shipments to the US and Europe, and to its ties with Cuba, Iran and Russia — is unlikely to last.

Past US attempts at “nation-building” amounted to very costly failures because the task was entrusted to the US armed forces, whose deep and varied expertise did not, and does not, include the techniques of imperial governance. Such statecraft moreover requires the confident assertion of a decisive civilizational superiority — terribly unfashionable these days but the only possible justification for imperial rule.

It was a feat last accomplished by General Douglas MacArthur, from the moment he arrived to rule Japan on August 30, 1945, fully ready and willing to make decisions on anything that came his way. That included the feasibility of Emperor Hirohito’s continued rule, which he emphatically favored, ultimately having his way in spite of global opposition by endorsing the execution of hundreds of captured Japanese officers, which culminated with the 1948 hanging of seven top imperial lieges.

Compare that with David H. Petraeus’s record as US commander in Afghanistan. He thought it wise to piously mumble about the “Holy Koran” in a land ravaged by Islamist extremism — once even in response to the killing of a female Norwegian lieutenant colonel by a mob which had been stirred to action by a state-salaried Imam lying about a Koran burning in Florida.

Venezuela is neither Japan nor Afghanistan, however, but a structurally misgoverned Latino republic, which once nonetheless thrived thanks to its oil revenues that were collected directly by the state, and which once also enjoyed democratic elections, clean drinking water and affluence. Now its people starve as the wealthy elites are in exile and have been replaced by several million Chavistas who do little or no work to collect their wages and benefits as militia members. All the while, disorder appears to be increasing on the streets of Caracas.

What does Trump intend to do if not nation-build? How does he convince his followers of his actual intent? And who will produce the necessary stabilization policies?

What the country needs is rebuilding, and that starts with the economy. The country’s devastating decline began when Hugo Chavez came to power in 1998, quickly replacing capitalist failure with communist failure imported from Cuba. But unlike Cuba, whose only competitive industry is prostitution for hard-currency tourists, Venezuela was always rich in oil. The greatest economic crime that Chavez initiated, and that Maduro completed, was the destruction of the country’s once-admirable state-owned oil company Pedevesa. Before Chavez began replacing its executives and even engineers with his unqualified followers, the company was very efficiently run by a cadre of highly professional petroleum engineers.

It was not enough for Chavez to weaken Pedevesa’s profitability by giving large amounts of oil to Cuba for free: he replaced its executives with his political hangers-on, and then did the same even with its production engineers. Because Brazil’s oil industry was growing during those same years, and because Pedevesa had an excellent reputation, many of its expert employees migrated to Brazil, and inevitably Venezuela’s oil output started to decline, eventually down to one million barrels of oil per day or fewer, instead of three million and more.

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When Maduro took over, he might have saved Pedevesa — and his country’s economy — by expelling the Chavez parasites and issuing a call for the company’s veterans to return. Instead, he chose to earn US dollars by using the Venezuelan armed forces to help the Colombian drug cartels send their goods to the US, Canada and Europe by land and sea.

Now the key to Venezuela’s recovery is the return of the diaspora. The wealthy Venezuelan exiles in the Dominican Republic’s La Romana enclave, as well as in Key Biscayne, Florida, and beyond, include highly skilled professionals who are badly needed back home. Yet while they may be celebrating Maduro’s ouster, they are unlikely to return until the country is fully stabilized by others.

The far larger number of very recent exiles — in the millions — who have fled as far as Chile to feed their families are much more likely to return because they have no wealth to live on, nor have they settled down. Facilitating their return with the provision of transport and food is the one thing that the US could do with its military means, along with the implicit threat of more air strikes if the militia prevents the return of the exiles to their abandoned homes. That is all the US can do without a politically and practically impossible return to “nation-building”.

Having seized control of Venezuela, the US must restore the country to working order and do so quickly. Otherwise it will soon exhaust the patience of Trump’s America First followers — who have every reason to be skeptical.

Despite Donald Trump’s provocative assertion that the United States is going to “run” Venezuela and manage its transition for the foreseeable future, Washington has so far avoided the far costlier path of outright occupation. Trump has openly dismissed US-backed opposition figure María Corina Machado as lacking the domestic “support and respect” necessary to lead the country, while signaling that his administration is instead liaising with Venezuela’s vice president (and, tellingly, its oil and finance minister) Delcy Rodríguez, whom he described as “willing to do what we think is necessary.” 

With Rodríguez named interim president by Venezuela’s Supreme Court (presumably with American approval), and no indication that Washington is prepared to deploy the hundreds of thousands of troops required to govern the country directly, Trump appears intent on “running” Venezuela indirectly — through the existing state apparatus and the military — while using sanctions, naval embargoes, and the credible threat of renewed force as an albatross around the neck of the Venezuelan leadership. 

The objective, in short, is not regime change in the conventional War on Terror sense, but instead managed continuity: preventing immediate collapse, securing oil infrastructure, and coercing compliance without assuming responsibility for the country’s political and social wreckage. If true, this raises the likelihood that the entire episode has been a US-backed military coup that will ironically preserve Chavismo and Bolivarian politics in Venezuela in a new US-dealing, “business-first” garb: simply without Maduro himself.

Such an outcome would suggest that the Trump administration resisted the temptation of full-scale ideological regime change and remains pragmatic enough to avoid a prolonged ground invasion of Venezuela. The fallout — refugee crisis, internal unrest, and elite fragmentation — remains to be seen. Yet history offers little comfort that Maduro’s removal will lead to stability, let alone liberal democracy. If past US interventions are any guide, the long-term effect is more likely to be the further militarization of Venezuelan politics, with nationalism and social order emerging as the primary glue of regime solidarity. 

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Indeed, despite widespread discontent with Maduro’s rule, pro-government crowds have already gathered in Caracas to protest his overnight ouster by a foreign power. Chavismo, long sustained by anti-imperialist rhetoric, may now find renewed legitimacy precisely because Maduro was removed not by Venezuelans themselves, but by Washington and the CIA.

Beyond Venezuela itself, the broader message of the operation is unmistakable. The United States has forcefully communicated to the nations of the Western Hemisphere that it will justify its military interventions by claiming the right to enforce US law internationally — at least in the Americas — regardless of sovereignty, regional instability, or political blowback. Coming on the heels of the National Security Strategy’s call to reassert an updated, neo-mercantilist version of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the strike represents an ultimatum: Washington will act as the hemisphere’s police, enforcing its economic sphere of influence by force if necessary.

Washington’s actions in Venezuela reflect a Trump doctrine that views the world less as an ideological battlefield of liberals and autocrats than as an arena of zero-sum economic competition among great powers. In this framing, the Western Hemisphere is not merely a security perimeter, as in Roosevelt’s doctrine, but a commercial hinterland whose resources, markets, and supply chains must remain firmly under American control. Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, critical minerals, and strategic location for maritime trade therefore loom far larger in Washington’s calculus than any abstract concern with democracy, international law, or human rights.

Ideology, again, is secondary here. What matters is deal-making, playing ball, and cooperating with US commercial interests. This helps explain Washington’s readiness to work with figures drawn from the core of the Chavista state rather than the long-favored exile opposition. Loyalty is transactional, not doctrinal; legitimacy flows not from ballots or values, but from compliance with the imperial center.

This also explains why the attack on Venezuela appears unprovoked when assessed through traditional security frameworks. Caracas posed no credible military threat to the United States, nor was the country on the brink of imminent collapse, something that might have triggered intervention on classical Rooseveltian grounds. The intervention’s triggers were economic; its legalistic framing as countering narco-terrorism or drug-trafficking is nothing but window dressing. The goal was to secure US leverage over Venezuelan resources while decisively excluding non-hemispheric competitors — above all China and Russia — from consolidating their economic footholds in the Americas.

The unresolved question is whether this “Trump Corollary” is geographically bounded. Does it, to put it bluntly, actually put America First? Will the military interventions stop in the Americas, or does it foreshadow a broader claim that the entire world constitutes a legitimate US sphere of interest — continuing the decades-long tradition of transforming the American military into a global police force?

Only time will tell. But if the “American-Sphere” logic that undergirds the Trump doctrine loses its geographic grip and sense of limits to bleed into outright globalism, promoting US corporatism worldwide down the barrel of a gun, then the Trump administration has learned the wrong lesson from America’s postwar misadventures. While the more macho America Firsters might try to justify military interventions in the hemisphere on realpolitik and geoeconomic grounds, such militarism will be exceedingly difficult to explain, and indeed execute, across far-flung Eurasia: where other regional powers will inevitably exercise their own claims to sphere of influence. 

Ultimately, unrestrained militarism is not only expensive and inflationary, but risky and escalatory. If Trump loses touch with basic tenets of Washingtonian realism, and refuses to adapt to the more regionalist and civilizational world that is emerging, then his checkmating of Maduro will be remembered as a pyrrhic victory that reenergized military interventionism, emboldened the globalists, and precipitated America’s decline as a great power.

Regardless, the approach lays bare the fiction that Trump’s foreign policy is isolationist. It is not. The Trump Doctrine may be skeptical of nation-building, regime change, and Middle-East-style forever wars, but it has no aversion to unilateral, willful, and even unprovoked use of force. On the contrary, it will resort to military action whenever and wherever it perceives American economic dominance to be challenged.

This exposes the central contradiction at the heart of Trumpian realism. While the National Security Strategy speaks the language of sovereignty, national interest, and restraint, it simultaneously treats the sovereignty of adversarial states as conditional and expendable. The logic is blunt and unapologetic: power decides. Unless adversaries are sufficiently strong to deter American action, they can be intimidated, coerced, or even removed.

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By framing a cross-border military strike and the forcible abduction of a sitting head of state as an extension of domestic criminal process, Washington has effectively asserted a doctrine of extraterritorial police power backed by overwhelming force to use as cover for economic conquest. If national sovereignty can be nullified by indictment from a foreign, extra-judicial court, then no state outside the protective umbrella of US power can consider itself secure. Today it is Venezuela; tomorrow it could just as easily be Iran — or any other regime that can be rhetorically and legalistically reframed as “criminal” rather than simply a political, ideological, or strategic rival.

There is an uncomfortable irony at play here. In removing the head of a sovereign country through a swift “special military operation”, Donald Trump accomplished precisely what Vladimir Putin attempted — and failed — to achieve in Ukraine. He excised an intractable thorn on his side in hopes of reestablishing America’s sphere of influence over a country in its near-abroad. The difference lies not in principle, but in capability. The operation showcased the overwhelming superiority of US military power while signaling Washington’s renewed willingness to enforce its hemispheric dominance. After all, preventing Western encroachment in Ukraine is far more existential for Russia than Venezuela is for the US. 

Trump will undoubtedly tout this as a decisive victory. He outmaneuvered Maduro, avoided US casualties — at least for now — and demonstrated American primacy and resolve to the region. Yet the more difficult task lies ahead. Whether Washington can compel Maduro’s successor — be it Vice President Rodríguez or Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López — to subordinate Venezuelan sovereignty to American economic and strategic interests remains far from certain. The assumption that, through US military coercion or its “Big Stick”, Venezuela will simply offer up its oil and mineral wealth to US companies reflects a deep imperial hubris that harkens to the 19th century and is at odds with the post-unipolar reality of our time.

In the end, US machismo may have bested Chavismo tactically. Strategically, however, it risks entrenching the very dynamics it claims to oppose: hardened nationalism, militarized politics, and a regional order defined less by stability and mutual recognition than by fear and intimidation. It also does little to address the fentanyl crisis in the United States, which has nothing to do with Venezuela being a cocaine transit hub. 

Still, the precedent has been set for new waves of US military interventions abroad — and in a multinodal world increasingly resistant to American primacy, the costs of enforcing an economic empire through global policing may yet exceed the benefits.

 A cynical interpretation might be that, with President Trump and MAGA in power, various foreign influence operations are in overdrive, trying to recruit homegrown American allies close to power. A less conspiratorial read is that these days, some degree of “globalism” is impossible to avoid for influencers and intellectuals — even hard-core nationalist ones.

 The crisscrossing lines of tension — between the various factions and their beloved foreign lands — became starkly visible this week during the annual Doha Forum. The Qatari state sponsors the annual gabfest to promote “Diplomacy, Dialogue, Diversity.” Tucker Carlson, a leading spokesman for the Israel-critical faction of MAGA, spoke at the forum, and was pictured on the sidelines flipping off the camera while holding a cocktail; in another photo, he was seen standing next to Donald Trump, Jr. (a reminder of the Trump dynasty’s general Qatar-friendliness).

But Carlson didn’t just speak in Qatar. He staked a personal claim in the tiny emirate, telling the country’s prime minister and foreign minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, “I am . . . tomorrow buying a place in Qatar…. I’m doing that because I like the city. I think it’s beautiful.”

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He was joined by Rob Smith, described by Fox News as a “black gay conservative influencer,” who gushed on X about the “INCREDIBLE time to be a FREE AMERICAN and visit the AMAZING Doha, Qatar! Can’t wait to return!”

To each his own, I suppose. I’ve only transited through the Doha airport, and couldn’t get out fast enough, what with the gaudy atmosphere, the tacky design, the dry duty-free shops — all upheld by an army of South Asian and Southeast Asian workers who showed the foreign sahib such extreme obeisance, it made me wonder if they were forced into it or kept in line with corporal punishment (human- and labor-rights groups allege widespread worker abuse, including in the construction of the airport).

Neil Patel, a longtime Carlson collaborator and his co-founder at both The Daily Caller and the Tucker Carlson Network, seemed to trollishly revel in just this impression, taunting opponents with a Doha Forum greeting posted from “​​the booodthirsty [sic], terror-supporting slave state of Qatar,” as he put it.

At his best, Carlson speaks for the Jeffersonian ideal of a modestly propertied, competent, and free republican citizenry. Qatar is very, very far from the vision. So why is he love-bombing the Doha sheikhs? It’s because they represent a counterpole to another foreign state, Israel, which Carlson blames for playing a destructive role in the Middle East and a distortive one in domestic US politics. Lately, the pro-Israel community has been accusing many of the Jewish state’s critics of being on the Qatari payroll. Carlson’s newfound admiration for the slave state — unlike Patel, I mean that unironically — probably has less to do with Qatar as such than poking his factional enemies in the eyes.

Which brings us to Israel, a site of deep libidinal investment for a different populist faction — and not just populists, but also classical liberals, neoconservatives, and hard-core evangelical Zionists, among others — and for a much longer span than the Right has been interested in charming Qatar.

For Americans of a certain vintage (me included), support for Israel has been an extension of our faith in Western democracy, and an expression of our solicitude for the Jewish people in the wake of the Holocaust. Zionism predates the industrial slaughter of Jews in World War II, but that event added urgency to it. In my case, part of my political maturation involved the conclusion that, for so long as the world is divided into nation-states, the Jews are entitled to one of their own.

Yet lately, Israel’s American reception has dramatically changed. The Jewish state’s popularity is underwater with nearly all demographic groups save for Republicans over the age of 50. This owes to a number of factors. One is fatigue with the Mideast wars and, relatedly, strategic divergence between Jerusalem and Washington (the United States wants to leave the region; Israel keeps goading Washington back in, most recently by explicitly demanding American intervention in its 12-Day War with Iran).

Another is the brutality of Israel’s operations in Gaza — and the growing power of an Israeli hard Right that makes the country hard to swallow for liberal-minded Americans, not least many younger American Jews. 

Amid these troubles, Israel has become a Right-wing-influencer destination (even as others take the opposite journey to Qatar). For hard-line populists drawn to it — figures like Laura Loomer and Tommy Robinson — support for Israel is less about postwar liberal ideals and more about the Jewish state as a smiter of Muslims and a place that is increasingly and unabashedly ethno-nationalist, a transformation they wish more Western democracies would emulate.

The pundit junkets to Israel continue — I’ve taken several under the auspices of mainstream Jewish groups and Christian ones — but they have a different tenor now, and attract a different type of commentator.

Other MAGA trips have similar domestic valences. Hungary is seen as a successful nationalist model that combines an unapologetic cultural conservatism and border restrictionism with Christian-democratic, pro-family welfarism (though many Anglo-American admirers neglect to notice, much less try to reproduce, that last aspect). Russia is, for some, a “based” avatar of Christian civilization (notwithstanding its high rates of alcoholism and low birth rates); others rally to its cause because they oppose NATO interventionism and NATO values (“globo-homo”).

Here’s the thing, though: as an American and a Republican, you can simply favor a more restrained foreign policy without falling in love with any foreign state, whether a fortress-outpost of Jabotinskyism or a decadent, slave-owning sheikhdom. Indeed, the modal attitude among the MAGA base is probably something like: to hell with all of them!

There is an interesting material explanation for America First factions’ investment in exotic lands. To wit, intellectuals and pundits are part of the hyper-mobile professional class, even the ones who outwardly reject transnational mobility. 

We’re hyper-online, have the means to travel, and attend schools, seminars, and shindigs that put us in touch with opinion elites from around the world. Moreover, the human mind, if we are to believe the Greek sages and Saint Paul in Romans, tends to seek universal models and rationalities. Pure MAGA-ism, for the chattering class, is almost impossible. We’ll always have Paris — or beautiful Doha.

In bombing Iran’s nuclear sites, Trump fulfilled a decades-long Netanyahu aspiration. But he also rescued Netanyahu, at least temporarily, from a short-term problem of his own making. Israel’s leader had launched a war with no clearly-defined end state, against a distant, larger and more populous power, whose terrain renders it safe from ground invasion. Through a combination of impressive intelligence fieldcraft and long-range aerial strikes, Israel has achieved concrete successes in decapitating Iran’s military leadership and degrading its ability to launch ballistic missile barrages at Israel, yet without eroding its capacity entirely. Indeed, the overnight Iranian ballistic missile strike against Israel was its most effective yet, as Israel burns through its stock of interceptors. What was until last year an almost unimaginable occurrence — Iran striking Israel directly, at its most sensitive and protected sites — now happens multiple times daily. Israel’s wars of choice have always been short, pre-emptive blows aiming to quickly triumph over enemies a longer war of attrition would favor. The current war is no exception. The pleas from Israel’s leadership for direct American involvement, initially rebuffed by Trump, were a recognition of the fact that Netanyahu had started a conflict which Israel could not finish alone. In this, Israel’s course of action, as the International Relations scholar Emma Ashford observed, was “about as clear a case of attempted alliance entrapment as you’ll ever find outside an IR theory book”.

Yet the need to bring in American firepower is a rational one for Israel. As the eminent scholar of air power Richard Pape notes, Israel is attempting to do something that has never successfully been done: topple a regime through air power alone. While there is a first time for everything, the more likely result, as Pape notes, of Israel’s overconfidence “in what its technologically advanced weapons can do is likely to harden Iran’s resolve and produce the opposite of its intended results: a more dangerous Iran, now armed with nuclear weapons”. Whether or not it decides to respond directly against the United States, risking an all-out war it can ill-afford to wage, Iran is almost certain to now withdraw from any external monitoring of its nuclear program, and from meaningful diplomatic outreach to the erratic and provably untrustworthy superpower. As Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, hurrying to Moscow for support, remarked: “Last week, we were in negotiations with the US when Israel decided to blow up that diplomacy. This week, we held talks with the E3/EU when the US decided to blow up that diplomacy. What conclusion would you draw?”

Iran’s cautious and elderly Supreme Leader Khamenei, who has long resisted acquiring nuclear weapons, is now surely as threatened from within his own regime by younger and more radical elements as he is by Israeli targeting. Diplomacy has been proved not only fruitless but directly harmful, while caution in acquiring nuclear weapons capabilities has been shown to be a strategic disaster. In the short term, a direct response to the American strikes may be outside Iran’s capabilities, as it struggles to fend off Israel’s multi-faceted assault. But whether or not, as Iranian regime sources claim, the United States provided advance warning of the strikes, and whether or not Iran managed to remove nuclear materials from the attack sites beforehand, in the longer term the logic of events will push Iran, as well as regional rivals of Israel such as Turkey, to acquire nuclear weapons capabilities as quickly and covertly as possible, outside international oversight.

But if the Iranian regime struggles with unpalatable choices, so does its American counterpart, now urging a return to the nuclear negotiations abruptly ended by Israeli bombing. Vice President JD Vance’s claim today that “We’re not at war with Iran, we’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program,” can be read as a de-escalatory attempt by a long-standing critic of American interventionism in the Middle East to keep an Iranian response within symbolic bounds, and return to the negotiating track. Indeed, Vance was quoted by Reuters just days ago as “saying the United States shouldn’t be directly involved and suggesting that the Israelis were going to drag the country into war.” He was correct on both counts. As the anti-interventionist IR scholar Stephen Wertheim observes, Israel “acted less to preempt an Iranian bomb than to preempt American diplomacy,” and in this it was entirely successful.

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In pursuing a course of action likely to accelerate Iran’s nuclear weapons program, while removing international oversight, the Trump administration has crossed a Rubicon previous administrations had worked hard to sidestep. Advocates of regime change will now conjure proofs that the one-off strikes were less effective than hoped, and new and allegedly urgent targets will soon be proffered for bombing. America will now be locked into recurrent military intervention to “mow the grass” of Iran’s nuclear program on the basis of intelligence which will necessarily be unclear, speculative and politically contentious, not least among America’s increasingly conspiratorial and anti-interventionist populist Right. As Vance, a connoisseur and product of the dissident Right, surely understands, a dangerous backlash for American Jews in general as well as for Israel is brewing on the populist Right, far more so than on the pro-Palestine Left that has until now absorbed their attention. But for Israel and its friendly lobbyists in Washington, that is a problem for another time: for now the restrainers and America Firsters are humbled, and the neoconservatives and Never-Trumpers exultant.

And they have every reason to be: in embroiling the anti-interventionist Trump administration into long-term military confrontation against Iran, against its own repeatedly-expressed will, Netanyahu’s inveterate high-stakes gambling has once again won out. Threatened by corruption charges at home, and a war crimes warrant abroad, the Israeli strongman has nevertheless shown himself to be the most influential actor in US foreign policy, far more so than America’s mere Vice President. Netanyahu may not be able to install a pliable new regime in Tehran, but bending Washington to his will has proved a far easier task. Yet as with Iran, the longer term effects, as the week’s events work their way through America’s political tumult, may be far less palatable for Tel Aviv and its Washington advocates than the short-term gains. In playing its Trump card so flagrantly for short-term ends, Israel has been left with a weaker hand in years to come.

This is a defining moment for President Trump and his legacy. He has to decide if he’s prepared to allow Washington to be dragged into yet another unwanted war in the Middle East.

The Israeli operation, codenamed “Rising Lion,” comes fewer than 48 hours before Iranian and US negotiators led by special envoy Steve Witkoff were set to meet for a sixth round of nuclear talks. Moreover, Jerusalem’s action follows repeated statements from Trump, both public and (reportedly) in private conversations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in which the President warned against an Israeli intervention that might “blow up” his deal.

Now, with America’s chief regional ally and client deliberately undermining US-led diplomacy and all but coercing Washington into war, American policy in the Middle East is in a fragile state. For Trump, who a decade ago took control of the GOP by opposing America’s “forever wars” in the Middle East, all this must be exasperating.

It’s notable that the Israeli attack comes on the heels of Netanyahu narrowly surviving a vote to dissolve the Israeli parliament, the Knesset. Netanyahu’s efforts to include ultra-Orthodox Israelis in the military draft had alienated the conservative religious wing of his governing coalition, forcing the prime minister to scramble to find a compromise before Thursday morning’s vote. While the agreement is unlikely to solve Netanyahu’s political problems, it did buy him time — and fewer than 24 hours later, he launched an aggressive war on Iran.

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The stated purpose behind Israel’s Friday morning attack is to destroy the Iranian nuclear program, with Israel Defense Forces Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin claiming that “we have no choice” and that Iran’s achieving nuclear capabilities is a danger “to the entire world.” But that clearly hasn’t been Washington’s view of the matter, since successive US administrations of both parties have sought to resolve the dispute diplomatically.

Following the International Atomic Energy Agency’s vote to censure Iran for failing to comply with nonproliferation standards, Trump restated his commitment to a diplomatic solution: “Look, it’s very simple, not complicated,” the president said. “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Other than that, I want them to be successful. I want them to be tremendous. We’ll help them be successful. We’ll trade with them. We’ll do whatever is necessary.” Mere hours before the attack, Trump stated: “I want to have an agreement with Iran. We’re fairly close to an agreement.”

Israel’s unilateral and aggressive actions have not only undermined American diplomacy, but have now directly put American lives at risk. There are approximately 40,000 US personnel based in the Persian Gulf region. Iran will retaliate against the Jewish state — that is not in question. The danger is that when the Iranians do retaliate, they will probably, inadvertently or not, hit American troops or other direct US interests, which would trigger a response from Washington.

Secretary of State and acting National Security Adviser Marco Rubio seems savvy to this danger, stating clearly that the United States is “not involved in strikes against Iran, and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region.” Rubio warned: “Iran should not target US interests or personnel.” Likewise, Trump noted before the attack was launched that the State Department had begun evacuations of its staff from Baghdad, while the US military was evacuating nonessential personnel from bases in the Middle East.

While American leaders seem to understand how this conflict could harm American lives and interests in the region, they haven’t yet commented on how such harm appears to be what Netanyahu is counting on. It is a brazen move of a kind that GOP realists of an earlier age — the likes of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and advisers like James Baker and Brent Scowcroft — would never tolerate. An alliance partner of the United States has launched a unilateral attack on another state, apparently with the aim of scuttling diplomatic negotiations.

Not only has Israel sabotaged US efforts at diplomacy, but these actions are endangering American lives in the hopes that the US will be forced to retaliate against Iran. That is, Netanyahu is hoping that an escalation will drag America into the fray to force America into a regional conflagration just when a bipartisan consensus has emerged in favor of redeployment away from the Middle East toward more strategically pertinent areas like the Pacific.

In response, American leaders need to take control of the situation as quickly as possible, and to do so they must condemn Israel’s aggression, thus putting distance between Washington and what took place on Friday.

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Allowing Israel to continue down this path without clear rebuke not only risks another forever war in the Middle East with an unthinkable cost in human life. It will, additionally, turn America into a laughing stock on the international stage. While some internet commentators have hypothesized that the United States covertly supports this attack, that would be a terrible strategic miscalculation: either Netanyahu has made America look the fool and is trying to strong-arm Trump into supporting a war that is against America’s interests, or Trump has supported Netanyahu’s actions for the same reputational cost.

Without condemning Israel’s actions, Trump is sending a clear message: he doesn’t make American policy, Benjamin Netanyahu does.

While the fog of war is as bedeviling as ever, the political options facing the United States are fairly clear: support for Netanyahu, whether actively or passively, will signal that the American government is weak, lacks autonomy, and is servile to the interests of a foreign government, even when that government intentionally endangers American lives and interests.

Alternatively, the United States can say “no more” to Israelis — they created this mess, and the consequences are theirs alone to deal with. This would not only avoid another pointless conflict in the Middle East and spare countless lives, but would also be a tremendous win for Donald Trump.

Joe Biden allowed Netanyahu to derail his presidency by going along with ever bloodier escalation in Gaza. Trump would be wise to avoid the same fate. If he truly wants to be the America First president, then Trump must remind Israel, once and for all, which is the client state — and which the patron.

That turn inward sealed its fate. By the time of the first Opium War (1839-42), China was sinking into its “century of humiliation” just as a forward-looking America was beginning its ascent. A century later, China had been reduced to an impoverished agrarian economy. American domination had been firmly established.

But could history now be repeating itself, this time in reverse? Today, just as an ascendant China is spreading its global influence, the US seemingly repeats China’s ancient error. Is America setting itself up for a fall as spectacular as China’s back then?

China’s decline has few parallels in history. Although the global periphery fell backwards relative to the West in the 19th century, most European colonies saw their economies develop. But China suffered the ignominy of seeing its economy actually contract, until the Empire collapsed and the country suffered a decades-long civil war.

Imperial China’s isolationism had begun early: it scrapped what was then the world’s biggest navy around the turn of the 16th century. Although the Chinese governing class, having long shown interest in foreign technology, was not averse to learning from others, foreign observers frequently noted an air of superiority in official thought. As one 18th-century British observer noted, the Chinese tended to believe “everything is excellent and that proposals for improvement would be superfluous if not blameworthy”. Moreover, the regime wanted to monopolize the movement of trade and culture, bringing it into conflict with then-free trading and ravenous Westerners, while its examination system for entry to the bureaucracy tended to steer ambitious intellectuals towards mastery of the classics over the search for new ideas.

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Above all, given the sheer size of China’s internal market — comprising nearly a third of humanity — the Chinese elite felt no pressing need for foreign trade and exchange, let alone overseas colonies. When the Empire dissolved its navy, one senior official noted that overseas exploration had “wasted tens of myriads of money and grain” in a search for “wonderful things” that however brought no material benefit to the state.

This ability to tune out the world set China apart from smaller European states that were engaged in an almost permanent arms race with one another. To expand economically, European countries and their colonial offshoots needed markets abroad. China didn’t. So it could afford to turn inward.

Yet while the Empire wanted only to limit rather than eliminate access of the outside world to China, its tendency to isolation blinded it to some of the implications of Western technological innovations — particularly naval, military and bureaucratic technologies. As a result it underestimated just how these were going to transform the world, with the result being that it fell irretrievably behind the technological frontier at a time Western countries were quickly pushing it forward.

It seems implausible that the US, as globally dominant today as China was then, could retrace such an arc of absolute decline. Nevertheless, Donald Trump is arguably repeating the same mistakes that China’s emperors once did, and for much the same reasons — a conviction of natural superiority, a sense the country can stand alone and thus dictate its terms of engagement with the outside world, and an underestimation of the transformative impacts of foreign technologies.

As China’s imperial rulers did, the US is presuming a false asymmetry between it and the rest of the world, having decided it needs the world less than the world needs it — its markets, its know-how, its protection and above all its dollar. This confidence, manifest in the administration’s declarations that it “holds all the cards”, has led it to launch a trade war on all its trading partners simultaneously, apparently in the expectation of rapid surrenders. The fact that hasn’t happened reveals the flawed reasoning behind “Liberation Day”, and we’re now into a period of standoffs and stand-downs which have left a vacuum in global governance.

China is rushing to try to fill it. Beijing has begun pitching itself as the defender of the global trading system, Xi Jinping recently telling a gathering of global CEOs that “we must jointly maintain the multilateral trading system, jointly maintain the stability of the global industrial chain”. Although the US is turning inwards, the rest of the world is moving the other way, shoring up their ties in new trading blocs and agreements. China is taking advantage of this to raise food imports from Latin America and Africa, with Brazil quickly sliding in to replace American exports of soybeans.

Playing into Beijing’s hands is Trump’s tactic of accompanying tariffs with isolationist measures, such as withdrawing from multilateral institutions or shutting down USAID. While the President may feel that such measures free up resources and give him more tactical flexibility, they substantially relinquish the diplomatic battlefield to China. Dollar for dollar, China couldn’t match the previous US aid budget. But now the latter has dropped to zero, the bar is easily crossed.

Most significantly, Trump is apparently so convinced America has nothing to learn from anyone that he is overlooking how Chinese technology is already changing the world. Typical of this is his stance on “energy dominance”, the idea that the US should forgo the energy transition to exploit its abundant and cheap fossil-fuel ecosystem. Aside from doubts about the feasibility of this approach, what is inescapable is that in pursuing this policy, the US is forfeiting a rapidly emerging subsector to China.

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No countries feel the need for a strong international order and an acceleration of the energy transition more than developing ones. This is where China has advanced furthest in recent years. Chinese FDI has been expanding aggressively in the developing world, whose share of total Chinese trade is consequently rising. In Africa, for instance, Chinese firms are creating power plants that then reduce electricity costs for, among other things, their mining operations.

Strategically, this advance into the soft underbelly of the world economy matters. While the world’s biggest markets are still in the developed world, the fastest-growing ones are in the developing world. Notwithstanding the claim of Trump’s energy secretary that “there is no climate crisis and we are not in the midst of an energy transition”, EV sales in developing countries are exploding, especially in some of the fastest-growing economies — up 70% last year in India, 200% in Malaysia, and over 300% in Thailand and Vietnam. So too is renewable energy, not only because it has become so inexpensive, but because it reduces the exposure of hitherto energy-importing countries to the vagaries of world markets, since no outsider can control their supply of renewable-energy inputs. Even petrostates like Saudi Arabia are moving aggressively towards decarbonization, which is drawing them ever further out of the American and into the Chinese orbit.

When a state finds itself the center of the world, as China once did and the US has more recently, it’s tempting for it to see its place as natural and eternal. But such hubris often amounts to pride before the fall. The relative decline of the American-led empire has been underway for some time, but Trump’s erratic and idiosyncratic policymaking may usher in a period of absolute decline, starting with a recession.

Given its democratic system, America’s governing class will probably respond and change course more quickly than the Chinese imperial elite did, making a full century of humiliation unlikely. Still, by the time the US does change course, China may have moved closer to its long-standing goal of retaking its place at the center of the world. That alone will feel to America like humiliation.

The trouble is that “America First” might be an appealing sales pitch, but Trump does not have a coherent foreign policy vision. Instead, the former president has consistent (and concerning) foreign policy dispositions: wariness of allies, admiration for authoritarians, and deep-seated protectionist instincts. Moreover, he is untutored in (and incurious about) most foreign policy questions, is often impulsive, and easily swayed by flattery — attributes that matter because, in contrast to the first Trump Administration which was largely staffed by experienced professionals, the second would likely be populated by sycophants and yes-men.

The fact is, America First is disingenuous, tissue-thin rhetoric. No administration in modern US history did not think it was prioritising the American national interest. Certainly, different presidents had distinct visions regarding how those interests might best be advanced, but none of them — none — however profoundly misguided their actions might appear in retrospect, ever pursued a foreign policy course that they did not think would be the best choice for the country.

What is distinct about America First is its tactics and vision. It is short-sighted and transactional, viewing every interaction with other countries, friends and foes alike, as a zero-sum confrontation in which the objective is to extract the largest possible share of the perceived visible gains. This is to be achieved by uninhibited, sharp-elbowed diplomacy, with little regard for historical legacies or long-run implications. In this vision, alliances are viewed with scepticism, representing an albatross of unnecessary obligations, which, like a protection racket or a mercenary force, only makes sense if they turn a monetary profit.

Some advocates of America First will call this Realism. It is not. The realist approach to international relations emphasises the consequences of anarchy: that international relations are commonly characterised by clashes of interest, and in that context actors in world politics may resort to the use of force to get what they want — and there are no guarantees the behaviour of those others will not descend into horrifying barbarism. Thus states must be prepared to defend themselves and look out for their own interests.

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This is admittedly a gloomy perspective, but there is nothing in Realism that implies what America First suggests. If anything, the opposite is true: it is a rare realist indeed who imagines that the path to geopolitical paradise is paved by short-sighted, nakedly selfish measures. Indeed the US tried this approach once before, after the First World War, and it was a catastrophic failure. After victory, an America First disposition led the US to pursue obtusely myopic demands for repayment of the debts incurred by its wartime allies, whose exhausted economies lay in ruins. A young John Foster Dulles urged the US to forgive those obligations, not because he placed priority on the interests of others, but because it was in America’s own best interest to do so. As he argued cogently, pursuing the apparent immediate interest — which the US had every right to do — was foolish, unrealistic, and would undermine “the big objective” of global “political and financial stability”.

Similarly, as the economic going got tough, the US also turned to an America First trade strategy, most famously with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930. More than 1,000 economists urged President Hoover to veto that tariff bill, again, not because they were looking out for the interests of other countries, but because they thought it would be bad for America. They were right. Imports to America fell dramatically — but America’s exports fell even more, as the legislation engendered retaliation and contributed to the collapse of world trade and the deepening of the global Great Depression.

And, of course, there was the signature foreign policy of America First, isolationism. It is possible that by withdrawing from Europe and acting timidly in Asia, the US naively thought that the world’s problems would somehow not encroach upon its shores. However, as Jacob Heilbrunn details in America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators, many of the prominent proponents of isolationism were also, at best, authoritarian curious, and, at worst, rooting for the wrong team. “America First” now, in both its politics and its economics, is a direct descendant of America First then.

Neither incarnation is well described as Realism. Indeed, after the Second World War, the US learned the lessons of its previous, self-mutilating policy choices and chose instead to embrace a more far-sighted foreign policy vision. In pursuit of what classical realist Arnold Wolfers would describe as “milieu goals”, it sought, often at some cost, to shape the international political environment in ways that would be conducive to the long-run American national interest. With the generosity of the Marshall Plan and the cultivation of alliances , America’s postwar grand strategy, measured, as Raymond Aron would insist, against the only metric that matters — what otherwise might have been — could not have been more successful.

Of course, all things must pass, and America now is not America then. Its foreign policy disposition should, and must, adjust to present realities. It is not just wise, but essential, to take stock of the National Interest and assess how best it might be advanced. A survey of contemporary world politics suggests that America First, take two, will be as disastrous for the US as it was the last time around.

Nowhere is the folly of American First redux more plainly visible than with regard to the Russia-Ukraine war. Reputable scholars can debate the long-run underlying causes of Russia’s invasion; also up for legitimate discussion is how deeply the US ought to be (indirectly) engaged in that conflict, and whether some of its policies might invite unintended and dangerous risks. There is no doubt, however, that the murderous authoritarian Vladimir Putin initiated this war of conquest, and that it is in the strong interest of the West for the lesson of the war to be that “wars of conquest by Russia do not pay”. Yet team Trump is eager to see this conflict end on exactly Russia’s terms, likely due not to reasoned geostrategic analysis, but the former president’s personal pique at Ukraine’s leadership, and his bizarre admiration for ruthless dictators.

More generally, it is hard to imagine US membership in Nato surviving a second Trump term. Once again, the former president’s analysis is curious, imagining the alliance as a dues-paying organisation in which the Europeans are not adequately kicking back to their American protectors. In his mind, the US would save money by pulling out. The first argument is fatuous, the second somewhat far-fetched, as the US is almost certain to increase rather than decrease its defence spending, regardless of its Nato membership.

Here at least the argument against Nato can be expressed in a more sophisticated way: should the US leave the alliance, some smart scholars argue, its European members would (finally) increase their own defence spending. That is a deductively sound argument, although not necessarily an experiment that most realists, whose watchwords are politics and prudence, would want to run. A post-Nato Europe might emerge as a more coherent and capable force, or the withdrawal of American participation might expose and invite political rifts across the continent; in either event it would surely reduce US political influence there. Given that Europe is one of the world’s political and economic epicentres, those are not risks to be embraced casually.

In marked contrast, the one region of the world where the isolationist instincts and alliance wariness of America First make the most sense is the Middle East. US security commitments in the Persian Gulf might have had an underlying logic to them in the Seventies, but they are plainly anachronistic today, given basic changes to world energy markets, the nature of security threats to the region, and limits of American power. In addition, if Israel explicitly renounces any commitment to a two-state solution, or devolves into its own version of a radical theocracy, it becomes increasingly hard to understand how that special relationship would continue to reflect the American national interest.

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Here the experiment of withdrawing American power and risking what might follow makes much more sense. Unfortunately, and uncharacteristically in US history, Trump’s foreign policy instincts are more similar to those of a personalist authoritarian than the temporary steward of democratic state. Thus for reasons of family business (Saudi Arabia has a multi-billion-dollar investment in his son-in-law, for example) and domestic politics (for the crucial conservative Christian base of his support, an unconditional US commitment to Israel is an inviolable act of faith, not the cool calculation of strategic interest), even under Trump the US might remain deeply enmeshed in the region, preventing the often-strained logic of America First from prevailing in the one part of the world where it might actually well apply.

Setting aside the prospect that a second-term President Trump — now unrestrained by anything remotely resembling “adults in the room” — might do something impetuous and outlandish (such as bombing Mexico), a proper reckoning of the consequences of America First must look to Asia. Here again the prospects are less than heartening. Trump talks forcefully about confronting China, and on this one issue, there does seem to be a general bipartisan consensus in the US. The barriers to success of an America First approach in this new epicentre of the world’s geopolitical chessboard, however, are formidable. Rhetoric, swagger, and more militarised confrontations are ill-suited to the challenge at hand. As American diplomat George F. Kennan emphasised during the Cold War, the problem — and the prize — are political. The danger is not that China will serially invade its neighbours, in a foolish and self-defeating bid for regional hegemony; the danger is that China might come to dominate the Asia-Pacific politically.

But America First is not very good at politics. A sound China policy will require close political partnerships with key countries throughout the region. And here is where Trump’s hatred of allies (or freeloaders, as he imagines them) might prove most catastrophic. The former president previously made noises about abandoning Korea, and his foreign policy instincts cannot but raise concerns in Japan. Moreover, if the US indeed undermines Nato, actors in Asia might further question whether the US would stay committed to the region. Whereas China is going to stay in the region, indefinitely, for obvious reasons of geography. Thus the risk is that US heavy-handedness with allies, alongside assessments of its reduced reliability more generally, might lead some states to “bandwagon” with China — that is, reach some political accommodation with Beijing that cedes to its preferences on major international issues. Such an outcome would not be in the US national interest, no matter how narrowly defined.

Compounding all of this, enormously, will be the Trump Tariffs, a centrepiece (indeed obsession) of both his domestic and foreign policy vision. There are precious few consistencies across Trump’s political thinking over the decades, but he has always been a passionate protectionist. And, as noted, if Trump is re-elected, it would be shocking if we did not witness what will surely be celebrated as Huge Tariffs. Again, one can responsibly debate the fine grained tactics of trade policy. The protectionism-as-panacea fantasy, however, will swiftly prove to be a nightmare. It will be both very bad for the US economy, and very bad for the world economy — miseries likely to be compounded by retaliatory tariffs imposed by others, which will likely not bring out the best in an administration that prides itself on “toughness”.

Worst of all, perhaps, is that the enormous economic distress caused by Trump Tariffs, among otherwise friendly states in Europe and Asia, will further undermine the broader goals of US foreign policy, and likely spark a growth inhibiting trade war that will contribute to a panoply of geopolitical stressors globally. In sum, America First will likely lead to America Alone, getting less of what it wants, in a more dangerous world, populated by players increasingly disposed to find distance from the madness of its king.

The recent history of British interventions in the region certainly reads like a nightmarish cycle of folly: in Iraq and Syria and Libya and beyond. And yet the cyclical nature of our national life did not start spinning with Tony Blair. It was 1839 when the East India Company first took Aden in today’s Yemen as a British base to protect shipping from the pirates then operating in the Red Sea, disrupting our trade to India. Sometimes you have to wonder whether anything ever changes.

For almost 130 years, Britain kept this toehold on the Arabian peninsula, before being driven out, shamefacedly, by local guerillas in 1967. Within a few months of the so-called Aden Emergency,  Britain would abandon all of its bases east of Suez, the inevitable result of Harold Wilson’s devaluation of sterling the year before. And so went Britain as a global power, and the start of its journey into Europe and our shiny new future as a normal country. Or that was the plan anyway.

And yet, here we are again, out of Europe and using our military power against the tribes of Yemen to protect our commercial interests and those of the rest of the Western alliance. And not only that, but now with bases once again west of Suez, established in Oman and Bahrain during the reign of David Cameron.

Essentially, though, we never left — Britain is still flying sorties over Syria and Iraq from our sovereign base in Cyprus. And in the case of Yemen, as I reported yesterday, this is as obvious a war as you can get. If we can’t fight terrorists attacking our ships disrupting our economy, who can we fight? Unlike the first decade of the 2000s, when we were gripped by grand ideas of liberal interventionism, or the second, when we convinced ourselves humanitarian aid was “soft power” that actually worked, here is a straightforward conflict of interest conflict, in which our prosperity is being undermined by a ragtag band of Yemeni rebels using cheap drones to attack international container ships. If this isn’t what militaries are for, then what is?

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This sort of intervention is the kind of thing we do. As one senior official told me, “it is in our DNA”; it is the tradition of our dead generations. Unlike most other European countries, Britain still (just about) has a military capable of taking part in such action and because we have it, we use it. We use it to project power and defend interests. We have the motive and the means to act.

And yet, this does not answer the question about why Britain should commit itself to having such a military force in the first place. What tangible benefit do we get from always being at the tip of the American spear in foreign policy? This was our position in Afghanistan and Iraq and it did us little good. It is the position we have taken up in support of Ukraine and it is now where we are in the fight to control the Houthis. But how do we benefit from being America’s most reliable military partner? Washington was little help during Brexit, bullied us into banning Huawei from any involvement in our critical infrastructure, and won’t even negotiate a trade deal. France and Germany, meanwhile, seem to thrive just as well without taking such risks supporting US hegemony. The Netherlands are now so small they barely have a foreign policy and yet they are far richer than us. What’s more, it’s not as if this intervention is without risk. From 2015 until very recently, a coalition of extraordinarily rich Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia spent $6 billion per month trying to defeat the Houthis — and failed. What makes us think we can do any better?

The great irony is that when Britain abandoned its military bases east of Suez in 1968, those who had been championing this policy believed it would put an end to the special relationship and usher in a new European era for us. Harold Wilson’s deputy George Brown, for example, had long concluded that Britain needed to devalue the pound and abandon any pretensions to global power if we were to modernise our economy as the Labour Party had promised in its election victories in 1964 and 1966. Talking to that great icon of the Labour Left, Barbara Castle, in 1966, Brown declared that Britain would have to reject any American financial incentives to maintain its global presence, cut the cord and join Europe. “We’ve got to turn down their money,” he declared, according to an account of the conversation in Ben Pimlott’s biography of Wilson. “Pull out the troops, all of them… I want them out east of Suez. This is the decision we have got to make: break the commitment to America.”

At this point, remember, it was the Right, not the Left, leading the charge away from the United States. “Left versus Right had lost its old meaning,” Pimlott writes. “Anti-Americanism was a traditional Left-wing prejudice. Yet the former Leftist Wilson, in his bid to shore up the pound, had become an arch-supporter of the special relationship, against the frequently Right-wing devaluers.” Indeed, it would be Harold Wilson’s replacement as Prime Minister, Edward Heath, who would take this to its logical conclusion, becoming the first — and last — prime minister to conclude that Britain should actively reject the special relationship in order to build a new collective European approach to foreign affairs. At one summit in the US, Heath even declined a privileged briefing from the Americans because he did not want to undermine the collective European front with France and Germany that he was trying to build.

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And yet, here we are, half a century on, and we’re back where we have always been, fighting alongside the United States, projecting our power, while the rest of Europe watches on, benefiting. You have to wonder whether this is sustainable, particularly as Britain’s economic challenges continue to mount — just like in 1967. In the end, a nation’s commitments cannot be greater than its capabilities for very long before something snaps.

In some senses, then, the fundamental question facing Britain never changes, much as the fundamental nature of our foreign interventions never seem to change. “Why Britain should want to keep a world role was a difficult question,” Pimlott writes of the British government’s challenge during the Sixties. “There was confusion about whether Britain wanted to continue to be some kind of world power for reasons of national prestige; or to provide a post-imperial sense of national purpose… or simply to guarantee American financial support when the British economy got into difficulties.”

Today, unlike the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the question is not why we are bombing Yemen, because the answer is easy: because a militia is attacking our interests. The question this time is why we are playing such a disproportionate role when we are no longer disproportionately rich. Tradition is not a good enough answer.

It’s not that the Special Relationship is off.  It’s more that the UK–US relationship just isn’t that important in Trump’s plans.

Trump’s foreign policy is built on the idea that America needs to be stronger in asserting its narrower self-interests. That means under his guidance, America will seek to renegotiate the terms of the rules-based international order that was built, largely upon America’s insistence, over the last few decades.

And Britain doesn’t feature much into that strategy, for reasons both good and bad. On the plus side, Trump doesn’t think that Britain is a major problem within the current system. Unlike his long-time bete noire Germany, Britain neither runs a large trade deficit nor chronically underfunds its military. Britain is also not a frontline state in the conflict with Russia: Germany and the East would be under any threat long before Britain would. Thus, the argument that Trump advances – that the US is picking up the bill for defending countries against Russia – doesn’t apply to the UK.

In addition, aside from the vital intelligence Britain shares with US spy agencies, the UK simply isn’t a player in arenas that Trump sees as threats – like China and Iran.

The flip side of this is that there’s also nothing Britain has that is of much value to Trump. Unlike other US Presidents, who looked at the UK as a potential military partner, Trump both doesn’t want to use American military might, and when he’s pushed to, he’s a unilateralist of the highest order.

But while Trump is not looking to cement the US-UK relationship for any practical gains, he will value the visit’s symbolism – he has a huge crush on royalty. Meeting the Queen and being feted at Windsor Castle will impress him greatly. Britain should expose Trump to as much pomp and circumstance as is humanly possible. Doing so validates his sense of self-importance – it’s a canny play to his ego.

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Which is helpful as Trump would love to sign a trade deal with a Britain free of EU entanglements. He has always said he is not a protectionist, and a trade deal with an established first world economy would demonstrate – to his eyes, at least – that he is true to his word. That ego-massaging might help the Prime Minister manoeuvre the President into expressing this desire forthrightly, ideally at their joint press conference. That would let EU Brexit negotiators know that she has alternatives should they act intransigently.

Trump’s visit has many idiosyncratic elements, but British leaders should note that America’s gaze is very likely to continue to drift away in the coming years. America built the rules-based order to serve its interests at that time. Europe was of primary concern in those early years because its primary foe was the Soviet Union.

America’s primary global rival today is China, and that means it will pay more attention to the Pacific and less to the Atlantic. American presidents have always put “America First” even if they have been less maladroit than Trump about expressing it. Britain’s leaders should recognise and accept that inevitability, and rely less on the special relationship and more on its own virtues to project its values and power in the world.

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