Last week, Donald Trump suggested in an interview with the British TV channel GB News that he might not help the UK if Argentina tried again to seize the Falkland Islands. It was a new low for UK-US relations.

The “special relationship” (Winston Churchill’s phrase) was never perfect, but the UK helped the US on countless occasions, from Korea to Iraq to Afghanistan. The US often stood by the UK as well – although not during the Suez Crisis of 1956, but Ronald Reagan’s government provided significant intelligence and logistics support to Britain during the dust-up over the Falklands in 1982. That relationship is fading fast.

Trump characteristically turned the conversation toward a grievance, and his disappointment with the UK’s initial reluctance to provide support for the Iran war launched on 28 February by Israel and the United States.

That reluctance was fairly easy to understand at the time, given that the White House refused to consult Nato allies as it planned its sneak attack, and the goals of the war were (and remain) imprecise and inconsistent.

It should be added that Nato is a defensive alliance, designed to resist a Russian invasion from the east, not support a US invasion from the west, to seize Greenland from a Nato ally. Further, Nato has no business in the Middle East. The........

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