Britain’s new Labour Government is doing what it can to warm up the old entente cordiale. As part of Sir Keir Starmer’s learn-on-the-job approach to international relations, he went to France to mark Armistice Day earlier this month – the first PM to do so since Winston Churchill.

Days later David Lammy and the French Minister for Foreign Affairs, Jean-Noël Barrot, met in London, close to General De Gaulle’s Second World War headquarters to declare their joint commitment to back up Ukraine’s quest for a just and lasting peace.

Writing in the i, the two foreign ministers go further, pledging to do all they can to resist what they call “Putinisation”, the attempted “annihilation of the global architecture that has been the cornerstone of international peace and security for generations”.

Nobody can deny the sincerity of the two politicians’ desire to cling to the institutions which have protected Britain and France for the past 80 years – headed by the UN and Nato. The UK and France rank themselves alongside the superpowers in their treasured positions as permanent members of the UN Security Council. But, the problem is, the US, China and Russia are no longer committed to the grudging cooperation which upheld the world order after 1945.

Britain and France are adrift in an increasingly dangerous world, anxious to prop up “global........

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