Europeans are on what might be called “a journey” when it comes to the US-Israel war against Iran, now apparently in a ceasefire after Donald Trump’s 11th-hour U-turn, calling off, for the time being, his threat to annihilate Iranian civilisation. The crisis in the Middle East marks the latest painful step, after the shock of the US’s betrayal of Ukraine and Trump’s threat to seize Greenland, in Europe’s emancipation from Washington. The journey is not linear, and it is dreaded by most European leaders. But the direction of travel is undeniable.

Initially, most European politicians in power all but endorsed the illegal US and Israeli attack against Iran. If the sycophantic Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, stood at one end of the spectrum of European opinion and Pedro Sánchez at the other, most European governments were tacitly closer to Rutte’s embrace of Trump than to the Spanish prime minister’s principled opposition.

Such was their desire for a transatlantic detente after the Greenland crisis and their antipathy towards the Iranian regime – for its alliance with Putin’s Russia and brutality towards its own people – that they foolishly fell for Trump’s illusion. They went along with the idea that the Venezuela trick, in which the US painlessly decapitated Nicolás Maduro’s regime, could somehow be repeated in Tehran.

But as the war in the Middle East escalated, Europe’s stance shifted. For most European leaders, whether explicitly or silently, Trump has gone from daddy (Rutte’s characterisation) to baddie (Sánchez’s view of the US president). This cooling on the war launched by Trump and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin........

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