Donald Trump, who will deliver an address from the Oval Office tonight, isn’t giving up on his aims for his war in the Middle East. This time his target isn’t Iran but Nato. ‘You don’t even have a navy,’ he declared about Britain before going on to denounce the North Atlantic alliance. ‘I was never swayed by Nato. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and [Russian president Vladimir] Putin knows that ​too, by the way,’ Trump told the Daily Telegraph.

There hasn’t been such a loony interview since Kaiser Wilhelm II created an international furore in 1908 in the same paper by denouncing the English as ‘mad, mad, mad as March hares’ for their alleged hostility to Germany. Trump, who is about as impetuous as the Kaiser, has gone into overdrive to extract some semblance of victory from his ill-advised foray into Iran. The refusal of America’s allies to enmesh themselves in his venture has provided Trump with a convenient pretext to fulfil his long-standing dream of alienate America from Europe. In essence, it would be a case of two birds, one stone for Trump: ending the Iran war and waving hasta la vista to........

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