Pete Hegseth’s Shangri-La Dialogue speech revealed the contradictions at the heart of Trump’s foreign policy: demanding allied military obedience while claiming to defend sovereignty, stability and freedom of choice.

Of all the chumps in the Trump Administration, Pete Hegseth, the self-styled Secretary for War, is a strong contender to be the most ridiculous and implausible.

He has no qualifications for his job and he’s probably only been saved from losing it by the reflected glory (sic) of the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and, much more importantly, his willingness to be the most ardent of all of Trump’s toadies. In an administration full of toadies, Hegseth croaks the loudest.

So when he recently stood at the lectern at the Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore, his hair matted in gel and bursting from a suit about one and half sizes too small for him, to minimise disappointment sensible people should have kept their expectations low. Certainly Hegseth’s speech was not the earthly paradise of Shangri-la but a mess of fake analysis, inconsistency and on-stilts hypocrisy.

The Secretary is burdened by the warped view of his leader that other countries have been bludging off US military spending. In the Pacific, he says, “security…has rested disproportionately on American military power”. He forgets his country’s military extravagance has not so much been what others have asked it to do, as what the US has wilfully taken on in pursuit of what it sees as the exceptionalism of its self-imposed “manifest destiny”. It’s fundamentally wanted to order the world in ways that best serve its........

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