Photo by Fred Rivett

Much judgement of the UK drifts steadily westwards, crossing the Atlantic in fleets of think-tank reports, news magazine features, breathless cable bulletins, and populist asides from Trump, Vance or Musk. London struggles, we are told, the UK shrinks, immigration this, immigration that. It feels only right, then, that occasionally we should return the compliment, offering in this instance a kind of summer report card in the opposite direction. For from this side of the ocean, the US looks to us less a republic restored these days than a republic rehearsing the same act, louder, brasher, and infinitely more troubling or grim second time around.

It was called policy. As if there were somewhere a conclave of earnest men in pressed but probably dated khaki murmuring over spreadsheets, calculating trade balances with the sobriety of accountants. But this, in fact, was no policy. To us over here at least, it seemed like a tantrum disguised as statecraft. Especially for those of us with so many great friends in the US. For those of us with, if you like, an American bent.

Come January 2025, and Donald J Trump once more in the White House, radiating what his supporters like to call “glory” but what others recognise as a kind of radioactive presence—dangerous, unstable, impossible to ignore. His first act was not reconciliation, not rebuilding alliances, but tariffs, as everyone knows. Twenty-five per cent on Canada and Mexico, ten per cent on Canadian oil. A flourish of rhetoric as wide as the Rio Grande. (Rio Bravo, as Mexicans famously and admiringly call it.)

In Ottawa, they retaliated, politely, but with steel. Counter-tariffs, boycotts, the bland but lethal vocabulary of international relations — “grave concern”, “profound disappointment” — that in diplomatic code meant we are done here. In Mexico, the response was even starker. Polling suggested a colossal ninety per cent had no faith in Trump, a percentage so absolute it might have been lifted from a Gabriel García Márquez novel as magical realism tricked into political fact.

Europe watched with all the bemused horror of an aunt observing a favourite nephew implode. Brussels cafes and Berlin ministries muttered about the US’s “Suez moment”. The deal Europe signed with Washington — reciprocal tariffs, heavy investment obligations, energy concessions — looked less a contract between allies than tribute paid to an unpredictable overlord. We Brits signed as well, customarily stiff-lipped, consoling........

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