“Though I know that evening’s empire has returned into sand, / Vanished from my hand…’ (Bob Dylan, Mr Tambourine Man)

Empire is a great besetting evil. Power accrued at a local level, political, economic, cultural, extends beyond boundaries and borders, and puts its own interests first whatever its justification after the fact. And when that power weakens, disaster follows. Reading Margaret Macmillan’s fine history of the 1919 Versailles peace conference we see various ethnic identities trying to reclaim their identities after subjugation under the Ottomans, the Habsburgs, the Romanovs – and indeed further afield.

At Versailles they squabbled but at least they talked. Woodrow Wilson argued passionately for the League of Nations. That failed with the rise of the fascist powers. My generation had greater hopes for the United Nations. And until the last year it was at least financially viable. We’re now seeing, with US funding withdrawn, its impotence as a player in world politics. What the Americans achieved by the establishment of the UN, with its HQ in New York, they will now bring down with another president.

Britain exemplified the economic origins of empire, with its tentative trading posts on the Indian coast. The USA has tested the military option, and failed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now again in the Gulf.  But its economic suzerainty remains, tainted now with a lunatic mercantilism.

We in Britain are now challenged as never before. Are we Atlanticists or Europeans? There’s long been an amicable divide, linked to attitudes to free markets and social democracy, with, of course, a cultural component. But now that divide has been literally weaponised. To Europe or the USA, to which do we instinctively turn?

I’ve always turned both ways. Liberal democracy and a free press, and a bicameral electoral system both sides trusted, bound us together. And underpinned the UN. No longer. We now have a cultural divide. And it’s taken us by surprise. Trump mark one we thought was an aberration. Trump mark two imagines a population of 350 million unfettered by rules and regulations, and freed from considerations of conscience or the rights of individuals other than their own. Freedom is no longer defined as the freedom to do what you will but at the same time recognise the freedoms of others. Freedom is – do what you will. Who knows what the consequences will be. And this restricted and restrictive freedom is enforced: institutions and newspapers which take a dissentient line are threatened, or in the case of the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, emasculated.

That notion of an unrestricted freedom now extends to Iran. It’s a war which exemplifies the short-termism of the deal-maker, and the willingness to risk, and the absence of interest in longer-term outcomes.

Whatever the outcome, Trump has played into a mood, enhanced that mood, and given his cohorts, led by JD Vance and the likes of Egon Musk and Peter Thiel (who is currently lecturing in Rome on the Antichrist) free rein. We have divisions in Europe over free speech. Both sides push boundaries. We should continue to do so. We argue, and we listen, and ultimately we accommodate. But there is an ever-more-vocal opposing persuasion that scorns the very notion of accommodation. Identity and woke once appeared to be in the driving seat, now it’s anti-woke, and the loud and aggressive combatants on the far right.

I remember back in the early 80s pressure on American publishers to publish more right-wing books. They simply weren’t getting written, and they didn’t have a market. Barry Goldwater and Pat Buchanan conservatism was out of line. By the 90s the big publishers had their own right-wing lists, and the 2000s saw the emergence of Fox News. Newt Gingrich decreed in the 1990s that his Republican congressmen and women shouldn’t talk to the other side. John McCain was the last of a noble breed of Republicans who worked across the aisles.

The message we should take from this – always stay in touch with, talk to, the other side. Stay connected.

The Republicans have rendered themselves powerless. Fooled into thinking they had an America First, stay-within-borders president, they now discovered they have a deal-maker whose instincts are playing out on a world stage to which they are massively unsuited. The MAGA movement may have weaponised debate but they hoped to curb American imperialist pretensions. Now they find they’ve been rekindled.