WE all have guilty pleasure films. One of mine is A Few Good Men.

I watch it almost every time it’s on, not because I am a fan of Tom Cruise or Demi Moore, or because the plot is particularly compelling, but for the iconic “You can’t handle the truth” scene. The audience is not supposed to approve of Jack Nicholson’s monstrous Colonel Nathan Jessep.

We are not supposed to condone his ordering of the “Code Red”, or to suddenly embrace Western imperialism. Nevertheless, the line “You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall – you need me on that wall” – is perfectly pitched to make people like me confront our own complacency.

When I say “people like me”, I mean people who are allergic to displays of jingoism and military braggadocio.

People who have viewed most post-Second World War interventions as motivated by a greed for other countries’ resources, and (with a few honorable exceptions) as having caused more harm than good. People who – over the past five decades – are more likely to have marched against UK involvement in foreign conflicts than waved Union Jacks and shouted: “For Queen/King and Country.”

People who have always known, deep down in places they didn’t talk about at parties, that the freedom to adopt those positions – however legitimate – was founded on a particular world order, in which their own security was more or less guaranteed.

Now, weeks into a second Trump presidency, that security has been stripped away and a new world order is taking shape. All the norms we thought were immutable – of decency, of diplomacy, of long-established relationships – have been upended.

The White House’s latest occupant and his sidekick JD Vance have surpassed our worst expectations, humiliating Volodymyr Zelenskyy, cosying up to Putin, and insulting a longstanding ally as “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 years”.

Weak defences

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted, for perhaps the first time since the Second World War, a........

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