WHEN YOU DRIVE INTO CANADA from New York State, USA there is a sense of coming home for the English traveller. Food portions are saner, grass greener, and they say ‘sorry’ nearly as much. Despite the US government’s desire to despoil Canada, I could easily be an American. Half the English spirit is spent coping with the British Isles’ maritime climate, whereas huge bright US skies make Americans admirably engaged, leaning-in, sometimes where they should. As Martin Amis says of the English, ‘If their long-lost cousin became a world-famous author and held a book-signing event next door, the English will say: ‘I might pop my head round the door, but then again…’’

The Great Plains MAGA voter propelling the new US administration’s economic nationalism, has both a grasp of their country’s constitution, and of what might be ‘the good society’. These instincts have called time on what they perceive as an opaque global system. One that extracts value from honest-sweated-labour, and pours it into snake-oil-capital-markets that fail to produce much of tangible value.

The typical American family’s relative decline in income and wealth, against a multiplying super-rich, are structural inequalities stretching back to the 1970s, and these sit at the root of American discontents. With Peter Turchin offering that where serious political candidates have failed, those prepared to “channel… popular discontent” in the most outlandish way, succeed. It is a bonus to MAGA’s grassroots that the Trump-Vance team’s ascent to power appears free from ‘shadowy-conspiracy’ and the forces of a coercive corporate-lobby. The plutocratic nature of US power is somehow overlooked for the moment.

By contrast the heartland British provincial voter has no working knowledge of their constitution, nor can they spell out any version of ‘the good society’, largely through disinterest (a survival posture). Instead, they trust their instincts (as does everybody in the final analysis). And it was the gut-led-British voter who called time on the European Union. This supranational value system could not be weighed or measured in plain sight, and bog-standard-gut-ethics doomed it to history.

This societal battle between the nomadic-world-citizen’s blind trust of market-led client-politics, and the heartland settlers’ stay-and-build commitment, was no more visible than when President Zelenskyy, in barrack-room sans-culottes, met the New World Order in the Oval Office.

One target of this reality TV moment was the liberal progressive Euro-politician. Who is now awake, and talking. The message: your defence shield has expired. American presidents have been trying and failing for fifty years to get Europe to fund its own security. Overnight the Trump-Vance administration has EU leaders committing nearly a trillion Euros on infrastructure and defence. Some going.

American pragmatism has called out Europe, which, in its moral flummery, has not stood up to Russia. It has been buying Russian oil and back-door-exporting through Central Asian states. The MAGA farmer says ‘why should I fund Euro-duplicity?’. The American heartland voter does not believe in a globalised rules-based institutional leadership. Institutions are client-politicians’ agents also, they say.

It may of course still go extremely badly for Ukraine. That the Russian war-tractor will hit full-smoke-spewing-tilt and cannot be stopped, spluttering towards Kyiv in a re-run of Saigon in 1975. But for the Trump-Vance administration to, in the parlance, ‘monster’ Ukraine’s president in the Oval Office is a reversal of principled politics. As Dag Hammarskjöld, UN secretary-general from 1953-61, put it: “Apparently easy successes with the public are possible for a juggler, but lasting results are achieved only by the patient builder.”

But, after decades of the principled global statesman and woman, and their celebrated grand servanthood, many sense these globocrats were not alert to their own complicity in letting the West drift into shallow commercial interest. And to even let it sail its gunboats unwittingly up to the front door of a wounded Russia, whose natural sense of pride makes it recoil. America’s Monroe Doctrine has no truck with foreign threats near or far.  Soviet missiles lasted 25 days on Cuban soil, and left after the threat of global nuclear conflagration. Secretly, the US pulled its own missiles from Turkey and southern Italy as the deal clincher.

For our Nebraskan farmer, she does not wish for Zelenskyy to become another client-politician. The modernist Barbara Hepworth sculpture memorial to Dag Hammarskjöld would leave many heartland voters unmoved. A symbol of unreality that permeates notions of world government. Apostles of the Enlightenment are privately contemplating how an illiterate and know-nothing political-base might just, after all, possess acute wisdom, born of life, rather than the academy.

The turn against globalisation, and its beneficial aspects, is not dissimilar to the vehement rejection of the more enduring fruits of the British Empire. Those elements of pre-WWI British power which enabled for some an idyll, including those whose dedication was marked by love, are no longer remembered. What is recalled of British involvement today, are the parts which, as Anthony Nutting, senior Foreign Office official in Anthony Eden’s government, would term, the ‘sordid conspiracies and political insanities’, such as the Suez Crisis.

Britain and France lost their empires amidst turmoil. Nutting resigned over the Suez debacle. An act which guaranteed his isolation. Few resign today as they know it is the end of both friendships and careers, as Nutting found. Rather, many plod on with repeated resurrections, compounding a moribund politics.

What might serve as a brake on the US’s rush to economic nationalism, is their reliance on imports: semi-conductors, metals, pharmaceuticals, plus an international network of military bases, integrated supplier networks, transport infrastructure, storage, and banking links. All equate to a functioning Western model that an isolationist America might send back into a pre-war world of trade bottlenecks strangling global market activity.

If an emboldened EU does get its act together, the US’s new transactional foreign policy might unwittingly boost the Euro as an international currency. If Europe takes the lead in NATO, then Japan and South Korea might seek deeper partnership with it. And it might make sense for Britain’s nuclear deterrent to further link with France in a continent-wide defence policy.

In terms of statecraft, President Zelenskyy is wise to wear his Oval Office drubbing as a gift. Be true to your humiliation, to borrow from Albert Camus. Wear it well, like a suit. Machiavelli, largely misinterpreted, offers that virtù (virtue) sits at the heart of statecraft, and any senior leader can, with suitable patience, convert their scars. There is potential to win over doubters who are newly sympathetic to your wounds, if not pleased you have crashed to earth.

Humiliation is not far from humility, which is the ground zero of enduring symbolism. And symbols run on eternal fuel, travelling around the world on your behalf. Recent poll ratings show Ukrainians maintaining substantial support for their president, and his grizzled pursuit of this miserable war.

For the US team, impatience risks them being despised for no reason. High principle still matters and if the state’s survival is not threatened, do not burn voter capital if you can help it. Markets thought the threat of tariffs were purely a negotiation lever. Since pressing the button some growth forecasts have been cut. Some analysts predict recession.

But like the pupil brought up on facts in Dickens’ Hard Times who says to Mr Gradgrind, “But surely you must know that self-interest is the law of life”, the core of this debate is the question of whether America will forget that all life in truth is a ‘complete and unlimited dependence of each of us upon the other’. Its vaunted position is the result of its constant curiosity and collaboration.

This very public Oval Office spat steers the Trump-Vance doctrine into a form of realpolitik. And the West has not seen pragmatic realism like this since Margaret Thatcher, Willy Brandt, Charles de Gaulle, and Richard Milhous Nixon.

Trickier is a sense of nihilistic patrimonialism. Operating a royal household, me and my mates, can be a blunt petulant counterforce to the state’s overshadowing bureaucratic apparatus. And it involves firing the competent, and packing your court with sycophants who are pleased to be there.

Quixotic moods mean US policy appears referent on some days to pragmatism, and on others to significant unpredictably, and this further troubles the state’s stability. It is too early to tell. The damage to state architecture is unknown. It is better if the unpredictability operates like a carnival (rule disruptor), rolling through town, and at some point, heading out the other side, allowing the streets to be restored to working order.

The West is stuck in a mire of regulation. If the USA does not wish to destroy its moral authority, take the carnival float through town, make necessary adjustments, but retain the intellectual capital within its institutions. If you smash them, it might be some time before institutional learning is restored. Business leaders think in terms of excellence cultures, but bureaucracies are sub-optimal by design.

And social strata is regularly re-shaped, but not always for the long-term good. The English ruling-class decayed steadily, its idle-rich marrying the entrepreneurial arriviste, and slowly disappeared, taking with it some of the aesthetic values needed for political judgement. As odd as that sounds. Flat meritocratic societies lack the repositories of social capital that are needed to be passed on faithfully to the next generation. America took the keys of global power about two years into the WWII, stepping over Britain’s bankrupt and bombed-out corpse. It was always going to happen.

In the realm of hegemonic stability, it is assumed we have moved from the bi-polarity of a US-Soviet balance of power, onto an unassailable US unipolarity over the past 20 years. But post-Iraq administrations have preferred strategic drift. With a vague notion the West will glide into a materialist utopia by itself. That institutions will replicate their values automatically. It is possible that future notions of bi or multi-polar worlds no longer applies.

Under a non-polar world of inter-relating global institutions, there is a heartland fear that Washington will slide into just another former locus of power. A has-been, like London and Rome. American voters’ resistance to ceding dominance to liberal-progressive globocrats leaves the stage vacant for a world led by a handful of power-brokers. Visible strong-men and women, locatable, and channelling heartland emotions and intuitions. If the good society is the sum of its intuitions, they will not be embodied by the rootless transnational bureaucrat. Dislocated officialdom is undemocratic. 

In America’s fight with global communism, much turned out to be shadow boxing. Cold War I was fought via proxy hot wars. But much was hitting and missing. In Vietnam the communist insurgency in the north turned out to be Vietnamese nationalists, fighting for their homeland rather than international socialism. There was no grand communist alliance, but rather a chimera.

Such huge misreading is down to paranoia. But in Cold War II, there is a very real alliance: Russia, North Korea, China and Iran. The Ukraine war is a basis for hard military-industrial co-operation between this bloc of power, who are entirely locatable on the map, unlike McCarthy’s ‘Reds under the bed’. Will America’s emergent doctrine of realpolitik and its transactional methodology be emotionally capable of understanding this threat?

In the UK the Brexit-behemoth awoke from hibernation in reaction to the Blair-Cameron-governments’ globalised-city-finance-public-sector-model. Politics has descended into a stoogeocracy, where genuine leadership is a threat to in-group power. Britain’s drift, morally and intellectually, showed up no more cruelly than within its attempt to monetise its Post Office retail network. Local post offices in the UK are regarded by some as second only to the local parish church, and pub, for community cohesion. The UK government’s desire to modernise required a new computer system. When anomalies in branch account balancing emerged the Post Office ended up prosecuting over 900 postmasters, with a Public Inquiry hearing that at the root of discrepancies were software errors rather than skulduggery. Regarded by UK politicians as the ‘UK’s most widespread miscarriage of justice’, journalist Nick Wallis said this public sector run institution was “stuffed to the gills with lifers, plodders and gormless apparatchiks inexplicably promoted into positions way beyond their ability.”

This ugly injustice points to under-performing institutions led by weakened governments and weaker politicians. And globalised liberal democracy has been costly in the minds of Mr & Mrs Ordinary-Tax-Payer in the UK. £800bn in taxes to bail bankers, £49bn on Iraq-Afghan Wars of Enforced Democracy (on countries that did not want Starbucks on every corner), the all-hours-working-to-buy-a-box-plus-child-in-a-for-profit-sub-standard-nursery, capped off by the self-loathing anti-Britain-anti-Western-everything narratives, adding to perceptions in heartland communities in the UK that the EU was part of the malaise. How the Trump-Vance turn against supranationalism will bring new accountability to institutions is unknown as transformational change is deeply complex.

In the US, heartland voters may be ready to accept market turmoil as a price it wishes to pay for re-balancing. Many are enjoying DOGE’s chainsaw, even if it will in reality yield limited results in deficit shrinkage. Slashing overheads is the accountant’s soft target, but when plates start crashing much gets quietly reinstated at a later date. Some unfiring has already begun.

This shifting moral terrain shows up as particularly muddy with Europe letting Ukraine and Russia’s blood and treasure disappear into the bottom of Somme-like trench warfare. The generals say they prefer to go into battle with a 10-1 advantage, and certainly not less than 3-1. Since neither side in the war has any advantage, the ‘do something’ option becomes a moral necessity. Realpolitik means Zelenskyy’s blushes in The Oval Office are momentary when an ‘endless war’ eviscerates a generation of young, and not so young, Ukrainians and Russians for no purpose whatsoever.  

And Russia’s deaths in Ukraine are staggering. Unsustainable. So why let them off the hook. Well, America’s economy is also not as strong as it looks. The US debt pile reaches to the moon. They are spending more in interest than their defence budget. Slash America Inc.’s monster spending on any wasteful secondary entanglements or it will implode economically. America is a debtor nation historically, but now it is a long way into the red-zone.

Here in Britain, we are comfortable for the moment to let Canada take one for the team. The popcorn tub is being shared as Prime Minister Mark Carney returns serve to his neighbours. We might be next. Do not upset POTUS is the current mood. If we just look at Britain’s nuclear deterrent, although it is “operationally independent” it “[relies] on a 67-year-old agreement under which America shares its nuclear technology and infrastructure with Britain”, unlike France, which is a “wholly national endeavour”.

But this is early days for all analysts. Every morning a new eye-gouging headline contradicts the previous day’s fragile trend. Leadership strategists like me are currently scanning their history books, biographies and just about every genre, for meaningful context. Two obvious entities emerge, NATO’s birth, and the rehabilitated legacy of Richard Nixon.

It is cold comfort to recall that Britain after WWII split its factory production capacity in half to fund re-arming, and to play lead partner (second fiddle) in the newly formed NATO alliance. Britain was factory to the world, its order books full, but gradually customers drifted away frustrated, as we switched to rebuilding a huge army to protect a dying Empire’s trade routes. It took Britain some time, possibly 70 years, to accept it was a bit part actor in geo-politics. The peace dividend has meant successive governments have let the UK army shrink to half its Cold War complement, bringing into question home defence let alone projecting power into the far reaches of Europe. UK defence spend rising to 3% by 2030 is essential if we are serious about NATO’s Article 5, armed response.

Newly fragile due to America’s resurgent exceptionalism, NATO now needs Britain as its champion. NATO’s raison d’être was the Soviet Union’s glowering presence. If America rehabilitates Russia into the West’s good books, this further calls Article 5 into doubt. In fact, it calls into question the array of international agreements whose ligaments formed around a shared Western worldview.

The last time such a grand scale balance of hegemonic power needed a jolt from Western leadership, Richard Nixon jumped on a plane to meet Chairman Mao and invite China in from the cold after 25 years of diplomatic non-communication. If we think it is a lot to swallow for the West to rehabilitate Vladimir Putin, Mao’s Great Leap Forward took the lives of up to 45 million people. Isolation is logical but often ineffective. Nixon’s, and more so, Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik looked past ideology and values towards the potential of reduced global threats. China’s hybrid economy, the blending of state-planning and market apparatus was the result, with the West fully embedded industrially, if not politically. This appears as the escape path for Putin, as galling as that is to swallow.

Importantly, Britain is not as politically polarised as America. Our constitution might be haemorrhaging due to successive governments’ erosion of parliamentary accountability, but we are still talking to each other with sufficient respect. So, wheeling in Homeric cyclopes to bludgeon one side or the other is unnecessary. That the Trump II team has not dissembled one jot, might give some relief. What you see is what you get. Everything externalised and nothing hidden. A world governed by transactional pragmatics, realpolitik, is with us for some time.

We get the leaders we deserve. Once Trump II has achieved a rebalancing of American interests, what next? And, if MAGA’s instincts prove more consequential to history than the globocrats’, and Trump wins the Nobel Peace Prize, then let us all eat out in Canada before the Maple syrup gets renamed Trump treacle!