It seems to be criminal cosplay season for Donald Trump, as he successively takes on the roles first of kidnapper, then pirate. There is a case, albeit disputed, to be made under the laws of the sea for the legality of the seizure of the tanker Marinera. There is none under international law for the seizure of the admittedly odious Nicolás Maduro. But none of that matters in Trumpworld, where might makes right and American laws and interests override all else.

Now, suddenly, commentators have woken up to the presence of more tankers from the ‘shadow fleet’ – which is both an inaccurate label and also an inadvertently cool way to describe a collection of superannuated rust buckets – in the seas off Britain. Calls for more seizures are the inevitable breast-beating result.

In those circumstances, there is an inevitable urge to present the implications for Putin’s Russia as all one thing or the other. Either he is ’emboldened’ by Trump’s spasm of muscular unilateralism or he is ‘terrified’ by it. Needless to say, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Trump’s position is not just America First, it is America Only

Maduro’s capture was the inevitable trigger for some vigorous (and often almost surreally hypocritical) Russian castigation of ‘imperialism’. However, Moscow’s reaction was relatively restrained, not least because the Chavista........

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