In free societies, when you don’t like the government, you support the opposition. In dictatorships, or under military occupation, you join the resistance. The distinction isn’t precise but it matters.

All European democracies have radical anti-immigration parties, some on the fringes of opposition, some that have crossed into the mainstream. None qualify as heroic resistance movements, except in the minds of white supremacists who see liberal institutions as part of a conspiracy to ruin Europe by filling it with foreigners. That is also the view taken in the new White House national security strategy, published last week.

The authors identify “civilisational erasure” by mass migration as a threat to American interests. To counter it, they propose “cultivating resistance … within European nations”. That means meddling in other countries’ domestic politics to boost those extreme nationalists – paranoiacs posing as patriots – who want to sabotage continental cooperation.

The EU is the main target of that agenda, because the combined power of European nations as a single bloc is a nuisance to Donald Trump in trade policy. He wants many small European clients, not one big economic competitor. Promoting far-right parties that will send nationalist wreckers to Brussels advances that goal.

So does tacit encouragement of Russian interests in Ukraine. Washington is impatient to get a lopsided peace deal over the line, and to normalise commercial relations with a Kremlin regime that machinates ceaselessly to undermine stability and solidarity among European democracies.

This all means there is a vacancy for a Maga stooge in Britain. Donald Trump can do some business with Keir Starmer, but there is no affinity of belief or shared cupidity with a Labour prime minister. The obvious partner would be Nigel Farage. The Reform UK leader oversells his........

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