Wrapped in a flag and clutching a beer, Marc Fogel looked understandably overwhelmed. The 63-year-old teacher from Pennsylvania was safe at last, freed via prisoner exchange from the Russian jail where he served three and a half years for possessing the marijuana his family says he took for back pain. His homecoming this week was just the kind of heartwarming scene Donald Trump needs to show ordinary Americans that cosying up to Vladimir Putin’s murderous regime could pay off, and the president himself said he hoped it marked “the beginning of a relationship where we can end that war” in Ukraine.

Or to put it another way, hours later his new defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, was in Brussels dictating the effective terms of Ukraine’s surrender, over Ukrainian heads and on terms that a former head of MI6 has called a “golden opportunity” for Putin to walk away. An American family reunited; a country that to most of their compatriots must seem far away, seemingly sold down the river. Small victories for those back home tired of shouldering the world’s burdens; anger and disbelief among allies. “It’s appeasement. It has never worked,” said the Estonian EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, choosing words ominously freighted with history. We are starting to see what “America first” looks like in practice, as a superpower that once prevailed by building alliances across the west dramatically reorientates itself.

The US is too preoccupied with China and with patrolling its own borders to be “primarily focused” on Europe, Hegseth explained: put bluntly, the war will have to end, and what happens next is mostly Europe’s problem.........

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