Ever since his return to the Oval Office, the question of how to deal with Donald Trump has, for democracies and dictatorships alike, been at the top of the agenda of virtually every foreign ministry in the world.

The issue for democracies is a particularly thorny one. It once could be taken for granted that America – whether under Republican or Democrat administrations – was the leader of “the free world”. There might occasionally be differences between the US and its allies, sometimes serious ones: think of President Eisenhower’s savage treatment of Britain during the Suez Crisis or the estrangement between America and France over the Iraq War. Those difficult passages notwithstanding, democracies all knew which side America was on in the great global competition with the authoritarian world.

That is no longer so. In an environment in which America is no longer a reliable security partner, or – as I argued in this column recently – does not see itself as leader of a more or less unified bloc of democratic nations, each democracy has to define its relationship with the US anew.

Donald Trump hosts UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the White House in February.Credit: nna\riwood

This is why the news last week that Trump had accepted King Charles’ invitation to visit the United Kingdom in September is important. It will be Trump’s first visit to another democracy since his inauguration. (His first overseas visit, to Saudi Arabia, is expected in May.)

The visit is not to be written off as mere ceremonial flummery – as, no doubt, many of Australia’s tunnel-visioned republicans will see it. In global........

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