Wanzhou, known as the “Princess of Huawei”, also happened to be the favorite daughter of Ren Zhengfei, the telecom giant’s founder. So Canada had detained, and the US intended to prosecute, the heir apparent to China’s most successful technology firm. As her lawyer argued, the then president Donald Trump’s attitude to Wanzhou was “the very definition of ransom”; her freedom would only come as part of an economic deal.

But then, in 2021, Washington dropped the case. Bail restrictions were lifted and a saga which began under the Trump administration ended under Joe Biden. The arrest and detention of a senior Chinese executive had gone hand-in-hand with escalating sanctions on several Chinese technology firms and export controls on advanced microprocessors. The political implications couldn’t be clearer: one part of America’s political class made it personal, another had walked things back.

Five years on, Canada’s relationship with Washington and Beijing has flipped. Last week, Mark Carney paid the first visit to China by a Canadian prime minister in a decade and tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, a symbol of the country’s technological rise, were reduced from 100% to just 6%. In return, China reduced tariffs on canola oil — a $4 billion market — as well as on a host of other Canadian agricultural products. Travel between the two countries will also become visa-free. Most important of all, Carney views the deal as a boon to domestic manufacturing, driving “considerable” Chinese joint-venture investment in Canada. Unlike its neighbor to the south, Canada has no domestic car industry. Its new partnership with Beijing could change that — besides bringing cheap EVs to the masses.

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“We’re recalibrating Canada’s relationship with China, strategically, pragmatically, and decisively,” Carney wrote on X last week. Despite his understated delivery, it is now clear that those words marked a significant change: Canada was positioning itself as the first G7 economy to seize the opportunities and mitigate the risks of a post‑Trump world. Those hazards became starker in the intervening days, as Trump ramped up his rhetoric on the seizure of Greenland. But the Canadian PM’s intent only clarified as Europe panicked. “Middle powers must act together,” Carney said in his barnstorming speech at Davos on Tuesday, “because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” Unlike the empty grandstanding of Barack Obama, or the rambling theatrics of Trump, his speech was deeply significant — acknowledging the falsehoods that underpinned a now-dissolving world order, while emphasizing the need to build a new era of co-operation.

This shift has never been more urgent. The American President sees the globe in tripartite terms, with Russia and China as fellow apex players to the US — albeit of lesser standing — each deserving their own spheres of influence. Hence his argument for acquiring Greenland, reiterated yesterday, was made in hemispheric terms — this is our continent. He insisted that Canada, and Europe, wouldn’t even exist had it not been for America’s war effort eight decades ago. For middle powers such as Canada, as well as South Korea, the UK, France, and Germany, this poses a challenge: their economic models and diverse security frameworks have long relied on a globalized order that the White House seems intent on discarding.

Carney’s speech was a muscular response to that challenge. “Great powers can afford for now to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not.” In other words, the West’s future — beyond Washington, and particularly for Canada and the nations of Europe — depends on collaboration. Alone, neither Canada, nor any European country rivals Russia, China or the United States. Together, however, they wield remarkable economic — and to a lesser extent, military — clout. Carney was calling forth a formidable fourth force on the world stage.

“When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon,” Carney declared, “we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating.” “This is not sovereignty,” he continued, “it’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.” Unfortunately, this aptly describes No. 10’s strategy since Trump’s return to the Oval Office. Starmer’s plan to protect British interests was to send the President signed letters from the King, and elevate a close friend of Jeffrey Epstein to the role of Washington ambassador. At no point has the British Government considered anything beyond meek genuflection.

Lofty rhetoric is usually just that — pieties untethered from reality. But in Carney’s case, words are matched with action. Between finalizing the China agreement and speaking at Davos, he also secured a strategic partnership with Qatar. Next: free-trade deals with India, the South-East Asian trade bloc ASEAN, and the South American equivalent, Mercosur.

Who could have imagined that the world’s most polite, apologetic people (yes, even more so than the English) would be the ones fomenting geopolitical upheaval? But if this strategy is bold, it is also pragmatic. After all, China and Russia, faced with measures designed to damage their economies, still generated growth and found new markets. Beijing, despite US import tariffs exceeding 50%, not to mention sanctions and export blocks intended to cripple its leading tech firms, managed to shift its export focus and achieve a record trade surplus of $1.2 trillion, even as exports to America fell by 20%. Russia, having lost access to most of Europe’s energy market after its invasion of Ukraine, pivoted East — and saw growth of 8% in two years.

To those two civilizational powers who turned on a geopolitical sixpence, we can now add the home of ice hockey and maple syrup. Crucially, though, Carney is offering a blueprint that extends beyond Canada’s borders, and its success depends on his country not acting alone. Others appear to be with him already. Emmanuel Macron followed the Canadian’s lead, openly inviting Chinese investment “in some key sectors” to drive growth and facilitate technology transfer. More than vacuous aviator-clad posturing, his speech reflected a long-standing French proclivity for technological autonomy that reaches back to Charles De Gaulle, not to mention that China is a leading market for the country’s luxury brands. In a striking reversal of the early 21st-century status quo, Europeans are now seeking partnerships with Chinese firms — on European soil — to tap their capital and expertise.

So where on earth is Britain in all of this? On paper, we are a leading contender to help catapult the middle powers to a new world order. London is a tier-one global city; we have a permanent seat on the UN security council; we are one of only two European nuclear powers, albeit with missiles leased from the US; and, in finance, AI and the creative industries, the country remains a global force. But Britain isn’t even at Carney’s table, as Keir Starmer scrambles for crumbs at Trump’s feet. Perhaps he lacks the political experience of Carney, or the braggadocio of Macron. But while both accusations contain an element of truth, the key reason is structural. Britain’s political class is more firmly committed to Atlanticism than anyone else, propped up as we are by the crutch of American imperium.

Remember, Britain does not have an independent nuclear deterrent without the consent of Washington. The country’s model of being a center for globalized professional services is more exposed to the peccadillos of this White House than anyone else’s. Ours is the least sovereign of the middle powers. While Zack Polanski recently called for a British departure from Nato, and the expulsion of the 12,000 US troops stationed in the country, a US reckoning might be delivered in response: America is hardwired through Britain, literally, from payment systems to servers, production and work platforms. The global economy, as Carney reminded us in his speech, has been weaponized to suit the interests of Washington. Now imagine the hardships for British business without Visa, Stripe, Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft or Apple. Even minor friction with any one of these would come at immense cost to the economy. And what of Britain’s great power characteristics, if not status, without Trident or Five Eyes? A hard break with the US-led order would hurt Britain more than anyone.

It might be painful, but there is no alternative. Trump’s argument to annex Greenland is that Denmark cannot defend such a large territory from Russia or China. Isn’t the same true of the Falklands? Or the British Antarctic Territory? Or Bermuda? What if Trump, or a like-minded successor, unilaterally decides to suspend collaboration on Trident? A French politician once declared it unwise for Europeans to base their security on swing voters in Wisconsin every four years. Why is it any different for us?

Britain, just like Canada, has no choice but to pursue sovereignty through cooperation with other middle powers, becoming that fourth force in global politics — by following the Carney Doctrine. But we can only do this if we can deepen our technological autonomy and improve our infrastructure.

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Could we come to an arrangement with China, like Carney? While Starmer is unlikely to ask Huawei to return to the UK and repair the damage inflicted after we banned the company in 2020, an element of cooperation with Beijing could be useful. Why not also harness some of their expertise in high-speed rail or nuclear power? How else can we hope to wean ourselves off America? Of course a measure of autonomy is lost in any transaction with a major power — whether China, Russia or the US. But the former, for now, seems like the most pragmatic option if Britain hopes to reindustrialize.

Alas, Britain’s political elite are terrified of conducting diplomacy like Carney. Economic integration with Europe, and military dependence on Nato and the United States, has atrophied the basic skills of government, which is in large part why the prospect of Brexit terrified them so. Just as the country of Boulton & Watt now manufactures vanishingly little, the nation of Lord Palmerston is unable to secure itself a place in an emerging global order. This is less an issue of competence than a reflection of the fact that nobody in mainstream politics has thought about it for more than a generation. After all, they entered politics during the End of History. Carney’s admission that the “rules-based international order” was a convenient lie will horrify many of his British peers who all own DVD box sets of the West Wing, listen religiously to the Rest Is Politics and worship at the Atlanticist altar.

And yet, despite our precarious situation and inadequate elite, Britain remains a prominent middle power. If any country should be attempting to restore the sovereignty of the wider West, it is us. We shouldn’t think twice about joining France and Canada as a midwife to a world order beyond MAGA, Moscow and Beijing.

“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies,” declared Palmerston in 1848, addressing the Commons about Britain’s response to events on the continent. “Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” The same is true today regarding a “special relationship” which has left Britain beleaguered. If Canada’s Prime Minister recognizes that, why can’t our own?

This time, though, it’s not a spectator sport: everyone has skin in the game. Back when he was elected, it still mostly felt like something happening over there in America. As I reported in those innocent days, the voluble cabbie who drove me from Washington’s Dulles Airport to the Capitol the day after Trump’s election win attributed it to American grocery prices, Ukraine, and the southern border: issues that, back then, all felt relatively abstract from my perspective. One hundred days into the Trump presidency, judging progress so far against these three key issues, only one is a clear win. And if, over the same period, most Brits and Europeans have come to feel personally invested in Trump’s progress, this is because we are — in ways that are themselves bound up in those three policy areas.

In particular, the two out of my DC cabbie’s three retail policy topics where Trump’s success is more ambivalent are so precisely because they have ramifications well beyond the USA — including potentially far-reaching negative ones, among polities that hitherto considered the USA to be an ally. And in turn, this has produced interesting new fractures in the “international Right” that amplified the Trumpian phenomenon and provided its theoretical backing — and whose non-American affiliates now find themselves, at times, in a deeply ambivalent position.

It was this Right, or at least that portion of it that spends a lot of time posting on X, that conjured the “You can just do things” sensibility I noted on election day as broadly associated with Trump. A key element in his mystique, the “just do things” meme frames Trump as a kingly figure, reclaiming executive power that, according to New Right lore, was progressively stripped from the Commander-in-Chief by the “Deep State” and bled away into faceless, structurally Left-wing bureaucracies.

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It’s clear enough that undoing this perceived fait accompli of institutional capture, in favor of “just doing things”, is a central project for the Trump administration. His team learned from institutional resistance to their projects 2016-2020 and, ahead of Trump’s 2024 re-election, set out detailed plans for re-tooling the machinery of government such that things would, once again, just be doable.

So has Trump succeeded in Making Things Doable Again? Perhaps the most unambiguous success story on this front, in cabbie terms, is the southern border. Just this week The Times reported from El Paso, which under Biden was a notorious migration flashpoint but where now, as the The Times puts it, “the only migrants crossing were quail, the little birds darting between gaps in the fence”.

Critics denounce the stringent methods Trump has instituted to deliver this result as evidence of his administration’s cruelty. But it’s working at least in the sense of preventing many new migrants from arriving. Last month, according to The Times, US border enforcement intercepted less than 8,000 attempts to cross the border — the lowest figure on record, and a sharp contrast to the Biden administration, which sometimes recorded 8,000 encounters a day. Unsurprising, then, that a recent Fox poll listed border security as Trump’s only net positive approval rating, with 55% of respondents approving of his measures.

What about prices? Here the record is more mixed. Trump claimed in mid-April that the price of oil and groceries is down and “the USA is getting RICH ON TARIFFS”. CNN disagreed, which is perhaps to be expected, while NBC’s grocery price tracker is equivocal. For ordinary grocery-buying Americans, things don’t seem either markedly better or markedly worse than a year ago.

How about Ukraine? Here, again, the scorecard is ambivalent. There’s been a lot of noise and arguing; several rounds of apparently fruitless talks have been had. There was that notorious spat with Zelensky live on air at the Oval Office. But Trump promised his voters that he would end the Ukraine war “on day one”, and to date that promise has slipped by 99 days and counting, though he later insisted he was only joking about “day one” and has further declared that a deal is “very close”.

As this has rumbled on, there was also the whole “Houthi bombing group chat” thing. And the US defense Blob has continued its standard maneuvers with reference to the Middle East, such that the longstanding Trumpian commitment to exiting “forever wars” looks if not hanging in the balance, at least complicated by a range of stakeholder views and variable competence levels internal to the Republican home team.

Only the most swivel-eyed partisan could point to either of these policy clusters and declare them clear wins from my cabbie’s point of view. Nor, indeed, could we claim the same for the follow-on promise to Trump’s pledge to close the southern border: deporting the millions of illegal migrants that have already crossed it, and are now residing in America. Though some efforts have been made — along with some controversial memes — making good on this promise is a task of such magnitude, and such ramifying legal, logistical, and humanitarian complexity, that even the first tentative steps already appear mired in multiple forms of judicial trench warfare.

Amid the partisan mud-slinging this has all produced, it is perhaps unsurprising that even Fox reports Trump now mustering less than majority support among Americans, across every area except border control. Europeans, meanwhile, have seized on and amplified this reported shift in the American electoral mood, with the UK progressive press reporting a “polling plunge” and “Americans, including Republicans, losing faith in Trump”.

But how much of this is just wishful thinking? One of the less often-discussed corollaries of “America First”, among even those Europeans broadly supportive of Trump, is that this means “everyone else a very distant second”. And so it has transpired, over the last 100 days, from every vantage-point except that of MAGA devotees.

Global business, finance, manufacturing, and logistics have been rudely jolted from decades of developing complex, cross-border trade relationships and supply chains by Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, and the subsequent flurry of walk-backs, carve-outs, and equivocations. Many people are materially poorer as a result of these policies. Even those European Right-wingers who welcomed the Trump presidency could be forgiven for wincing at the negative impact, perhaps including on their own pocket, of measures that even Julius Krein, editor of the New Right policy journal American Affairs, described as a “costly mistake”.

As a tool for rebalancing global trade, it’s at best too early to tell whether tariffs will ease my DC cabbie’s cost of living. Is it possible to mitigate the negative effects on American manufacturing of dollar hegemony, while also keeping the political upside of printing the reserve currency? Color me unconvinced. As for “the USA getting RICH ON TARIFFS”, perhaps the only sense in which this is true is if you define “the USA” as those who benefited from early knowledge of shifts in Trump’s tariff policy to clean up on the stock market.

What about the bigger picture? Is this all just the price we have to pay for dismantling the End of History era? As Krein drily observes, “[s]tructural changes to the ‘international order’ and global economy are needed”, but this is not to help the ordinary American consumer, or even because of meme-powered objections to “the GAE”, but on more grimly realist grounds. As Krein puts it: “the United States occupies a much weaker position than it has in the recent past.” And this reality also drives the most internationally divisive set of radical Trumpian policies: his desire unilaterally to end the rules-based international order America created and dominated for almost a century, along with America’s role as global policeman. That’s what “no more forever wars” means; and in cabbie terms, that’s what it means to end American involvement in Ukraine.

But whatever the ordinary American thinks of dismantling this international order, from a European vantage-point it’s wildly unpopular. The American wing of the online Right’s peanut gallery likes to claim this is because “Europoors” are freeloaders, who prefer to spend their money on welfare for Afghans and locking their citizens up for social media posts. But the reality is that Europe has been generally peaceful since 1945 largely thanks to continent-wide military subservience to America.

Should this end, this raises the possibility of cracks appearing in that peace and unity. In his memoir, the great diplomatic historian George Kennan describes the “abnormal” dominance of America over Europe after the Second World War as a kind of “paternal tutelage”. Kennan observed: “Some day, it appeared to me, this divided Europe, dominated by the military presences of ourselves and the Russians, would have to yield to something more natural — something that did more justice to the true strength and interests of the intermediate European peoples themselves.” But if Kennan thought this “something more natural” should “come into being when the time for it was ripe” that time was, for successive generations of American, yet to arrive.

Until now. But at this point Europe has grown accustomed to its subservience, to an America-led status quo. This is why, so far, Europeans have said a lot and done rather less about re-arming themselves, while Starmer has promised “boots on the ground”, only more recently to prevaricate about how “risky” this would be. More plainly: most of America’s satrapies in Europe remain governed by adherents to the internationalist ideology Trump has set himself to dismantling, and are going through the motions in the hope of inducing their protector to return.

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The aggregate result is an ugly mixture of insults and pleading tailor-made for Trumpian recirculation to a domestic audience, as evidence to support established beliefs about European rudeness and ingratitude. And yet even those Brits and European Right-wingers fond of criticising “the GAE” might balk at the pan-European can of diplomatic worms that would be opened by full withdrawal of the American security guarantee.

That can may open itself in time, anyway. For the best way to understand Trump’s role is to ignore the braggadocio and hyperbolic all-caps announcements, and watch his presidency not only through the lens of his promise to “Make America Great Again”, but also what this concedes: the reality Krein observed of relative American weakening. And this, above all, helps make the most sense of Trump’s first 100 days.

This period has seen the clearest wins in those areas where it’s less “America First” than America Only: that is, domestic border control. Where promises to his electorate implicate the world beyond North America, though, things get stickier. It turns out it’s not easily possible unilaterally to re-order the global economy by shouting at it. Wartime diplomacy, too, is a delicate thing. As the leader of a post-hegemonic America in search of a new equilibrium, this Trumpian presidency is less the new multipolar age than the riptide, dragging all in that direction.

As we smaller nations struggle not to drown, we can expect everyone to flail between trying to salvage old ways of thinking and acting and trying to create new ones. Trump sympathizers in geographies beyond the American core should remember that this applies to us, too. The grand-scale ideological coalitions to which we’ve grown accustomed were, to a great extent, artifacts of that globe-spanning American empire. I suspect that as interests fracture, harden, and diversify, we will find the international coalition that amplified Trump’s campaign and cheered his election will not long survive its own moment of triumph.

This is the situation we are rapidly approaching. In the Nineties, their heads spun by the unexpected Soviet collapse and the unipolar empire America won by default, the architects of our current order sincerely believed that a golden age of peace and prosperity could be won by the free movement of goods, wealth and people across national borders. Millions of words were devoted to lauding this new transnational order, as politicians busied themselves with the dismantling of hard-won state capacity, whose sacrifice would bring about the earthly paradise. To stand against this was to stand against progress; the protests of those who doubted the wisdom of the new order were merely the death-rattle of history’s losers.

Yet it is this order that is already dead, and the old world of hard power and industrial capacity is writing the outlines of the coming century. The ideological fantasies of the Nineties have placed the collective West at a great structural disadvantage even before the true confrontation begins. Rightly, in his recent Sorbonne speech, Macron observed that “the era when Europe bought its energy and fertilisers from Russia, had its goods manufactured in China, and delegated its security to the United States of America, is over”.

So, when Rishi Sunak professed to feel, as he did this week, “a profound sense of urgency, because more will change in the next five years than in the last 30”, and declared “the next few years will be some of the most dangerous yet the most transformational our country has ever known”, he was entirely correct. Where he is mistaken is in his belief that “the United Kingdom is uniquely placed to benefit”. Instead, Britain is almost uniquely exposed to the dangers of this harsh new world, through the compounded errors of those who ruled us during our brief holiday from history — and whose worldview, barely altered, rules us still. The world order crumbling around us is, unfortunately for us, the one around which our entire economic and political systems still revolve.

Britain is on a war footing, we are now told, as Sunak announces a return to the 2.5% of GDP defence expenditure previously announced by Boris Johnson just two years earlier: our fleet may be shrinking, our Army cannot withstand two weeks of war, and we still sell off what remains of our industrial capacity, but we are preparing for conflict nevertheless. In all the many examples of the gulf between Westminster’s bombastic rhetoric and concrete action, there is little that could instil a greater sense of dread. No one sane would wish to be led into war by the current Conservative Party, but then Starmer’s front bench hardly inspires confidence either: it is hard, observing the international situation and then glancing towards Westminster, to avoid feeling like a passenger sitting in the backseat of a vehicle revving up at the edge of a cliff.

Yet there is at least one modest victory we can console ourselves with before we crash the barriers: the destruction of the Conservative Party, at whose door half the blame for our current state of crisis can be laid. The possible extinction of the world’s oldest political party would, in less tumultuous times, seem a historic event: right now, it is the barest minimum we can hope for. Though a Starmer government may well be more competent than the revolving carousel of dysfunction the Conservatives have given us over the past decade, this is a very low hurdle to clear. Labour’s timid, vacillatory leader gives little sense of understanding the scale of effort necessary for national survival, and that the grand rebalancing of British strategy, announced by David Lammy, offers only a continuation of a worldview already splintering into wreckage, gives us little confidence in a dawning era of national renewal.

The entire system requires change — as Dominic Cummings says, “every aspect is rotten and this exerts a collective paralysis” — yet it is manifestly incapable of reforming itself. Indeed, it is a sombre augury of Westminster’s future stability that both Labour’s path to power and the corresponding Tory decline rely not on a sudden wave of enthusiasm for Starmer, but instead on disengagement from the political process entirely. Cynical and disenchanted, the voters are “quiet quitting” from British democracy, even as the Westminster system’s cascading errors make them poorer and angrier.

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It is to arrest this volatile course of events that two new contenders are seemingly emerging to wrest control of the British Right from the Conservative Party’s skeletal grasp — Reform UK, already struggling for a populist party, can for now be written off. Both Cummings, whose “New Party” is apparently focus-grouping itself into being, and the academic analyst of populism-turned-aspiring-populist Matthew Goodwin, teasing the launch of a new Right-wing movement if enough people subscribe to his Substack, are seemingly readying themselves to “plough the old Tory Party into the earth with salt”, as Cummings puts it, and birth new political movements. Though both have, to differing degrees, won the ire of the defenders of the current order, jealous to maintain control of the ship of state as they steer it towards the coming iceberg, their emerging platforms diverge in tactics even as they agree on the fundamentals.

First, the parallels: correctly, both see the crisis of British politics as systemic. For Goodwin: “We have two big parties… that were born to provide answers to questions from a different era and which are ill-equipped to address the questions that face us today.” For Cummings: “The old parties have failed for decades, they’re programmed to fail, they’ll carry on failing.” Both see Labour’s turn in office as a brief, doomed interlude. In Goodwin’s analysis, Labour “will likely become very unpopular, very quickly”, as “while the Tories are simply too strongly rooted in an old politics, in an old world, to be able to truly adapt to the new world that’s emerging around us today… So too are Labour.” For Cummings, equally, as outlined in an excellent recent interview: “Labour’s just a carbon copy of the Tories… the MP ranks are filled with obviously useless people who can’t do anything. And the party itself is dead. It’s intellectually dead, organisationally dead, same as the Tories.” The result, he predicts, is that “everything will keep failing and everyone will be even more miserable by 2026 than they are now”.

The opportunity, or in Cummings’s phrasing, “market share” for an insurgent reformist party therefore looks excellent: yet the British political system, with its Early Modern parliament clustered round by whispering courtiers, is almost expressly designed to prevent such a possibility (indeed, to imagine a different, functional political system may now even face legal sanction). Where the two differ is in their approach to this problem. For Goodwin, the new movement — it need not necessarily be a party — may find its greatest chance of success outside Parliament. After all, Brexit was, he notes, “perhaps the single most important thing achieved over the last decade and it had nothing to do with winning seats in Westminster… Indirect political pressure, from outside the system, can often be as consequential as direct pressure from the inside.” For Goodwin, the guiding principle behind the new movement, its overriding goal, is “popular sovereignty” as “the only way to hand power back to the people, where it belongs”, though the means to achieve this outcome is so far left unsketched.

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Where Goodwin is then a genuine populist, Cummings, by contrast, leans towards elitism: the effective models he cites as examples are California tech CEOs, “the subset of elites who are a) most competent at building but also b) almost entirely disconnected from mainstream politics”, particularly Marc Andreessen and other Silicon Valley would-be philosopher kings. The Cummings solution is built around “the elite Insider network”, who “are overwhelmingly in hedge funds, banks, VCs, PE, tech startups, research labs, academia and so on — keeping their heads down and building walled gardens between themselves and political madness”. Yet even here, the Cummings model is more democratic, in practice, than our current sclerotic system.

As he told The i:

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when Britain was the most powerful country in the world its domestic politics was extremely decentralised and now that so much is broken we are more centralised than we have ever been in terms of where there’s power and money. If you’d said to people in 1800 or 1900 that all sorts of decisions about what happens in Bolton or what happens in Birmingham and ‘Do we build this or not build that?’ will be decided by some 27-year-old PPE idiot in the Treasury they’d have just thought this is complete madness.”

Yet ironically, the two radical opponents of Westminster dysfunction depend, to a certain extent, on the ancién regime’s survival: but the greatest shock we face, with Starmer likely at the helm, is yet to come.

Like other European nations, only perhaps more so, Britain has committed itself to the war in Ukraine and the corresponding confrontation with Russia. Unfortunately, due to a combination of Western deindustrialisation and political dysfunction, and Ukrainian errors of military planning and organisation, that war is not going well. For all that Cummings’s dismissal of the Ukrainian state is too vicious for his analysis to gain much currency in Westminster, his assessment that Britain has found itself “getting into a war of attrition with Russia who we pushed into an alliance with the world’s biggest manufacturing power” is unfortunately correct. With even Ukraine’s leading commanders cautioning that military victory is unattainable and the best outcome is a negotiated peace settlement — a sentiment until recently taboo in Britain — the mismatch between Britain’s stated strategy in Ukraine and the war’s likely outcome is increasingly stark. A cynic would suggest that Europe’s actual strategy in Ukraine is to buy time, at Ukraine’s expense, for our continent’s own rearmament, while Biden’s aim is merely to palm final defeat onto Trump.

Yet with the war in Ukraine concluded, will an angry, more powerful Russia attack Nato itself? The answer is: we do not know, but fear the worst. Would a Trump administration go to war with Russia to defend the territorial integrity of Lithuania or Estonia? Again, we do not know, but the anxiety of Nato officials on this question is not reassuring. The United States, on whose military power our political settlement ultimately depends, has found itself on the back foot in Ukraine, humiliated in the Red Sea, and rushing to prepare itself for a war in the Pacific in which geography and industrial capacity weigh steeply against it. Living standards in Britain have been battered by the war in Ukraine, but the economic shock of America’s looming confrontation with China will vastly outweigh anything we have ever known. When, as seems likely, America withdraws its attention from Europe’s security to wrestle with its existential rival, our necessary expenditure on rearmament and perhaps mobilisation — even if we avoid open war with Russia — will vastly reduce available spending on the social welfare we have come to expect.

Indeed, the emphasis by both Cummings and Goodwin on “woke elites” and culture wars already seems outdated: it is hard to see such luxury beliefs long surviving a world where British voters, already poor and angry, will be poorer and angrier than we have known in many decades. Yet of the two aspiring reformers, it is Cummings who seems most alive to the possibilities as well as threats posed by the great storm forming on the horizon. As he observes, overhauling a political system is “seemingly hard, but history shows it’s doable but it happens in response to huge system changes. Historically, wars and pandemics are things that reshape states, and financial clashes. So now we’ve got all of those things.”

But even the most radical reformer would find it hard to derive much optimism from the present international situation: Britain’s political system only survived the 20th century through American military intervention, kept on life support by the unmatchable industrial base of the rising superpower. Without this deus ex machina, and in a world where China fills America’s Forties role — only this time, on our opponent’s side — it would take unreasonable optimism to imagine that either Sunak or Starmer will muddle Britain’s ramshackle state through to victory. 

We are in a situation where everything around us is rapidly changing, to our detriment, and yet our leaders act as if at the end of it, everything will somehow stay the same. Macron’s recent warning, that “a civilisation can die” in a “brutal” way in which “things can happen much more quickly than we think” seems closer to the mark. If the crisis is pregnant with political opportunity, as it proved to be for Lee Kuan Yew, it is increasingly likely to come in the wake of defeat.