Because European governments and, to a greater or lesser extent European mainstream media, are playing a rather supine diplomatic game with the Trump administration, the raw import of the Trump administration’s recently promulgated National Security Strategy document has probably passed most European citizens by.

But it is available online in all its crudity and menace and should be recommended reading for every thinking adult with an interest and concern for our own future and that of the next generation. Where it is not explicit, its implicit content is all the more disturbing.

For certain, it is being closely studied in every foreign ministry worldwide. In ways, it is as revealing about what we can expect in the 2020s as Mein Kampf was a foretaste of what was to come in the world of the 1930s. It envisages a new world order dominated by an isolationist United States intent on making America “safer, richer, freer, greater and more powerful than ever before”.

Readers who have ever played the world conquest boardgame Risk will easily recognise the game’s yellow and green continents in what the document calls “The Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. It speaks of protecting America’s access to key geographies in “our Hemisphere”. The........

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