Donald trump

Here we go again. Switch out Saddam Hussein for the Ayatollah Khamenei and Ahmed Chalabi for Reza Pahlavi and you have a fresh war for regime change in the Middle East, this time with Israel as America’s sidekick. With Operation Epic Fury, the American and Israeli bombing of Iran and push for regime change, the self-proclaimed “President of Peace” runs the risk not only of triggering wider upheaval in the Middle East, but also globally. Is this a new Sarajevo moment? With Trump’s own generals having warned him that attacking Iran could be a debacle, he may have torched his own presidency Unlike George W. Bush in 2003, who worked to bolster domestic and international support for attacking Iraq, Donald Trump has disdained the slightest effort to justify his war publicly.

‘The Special Relationship only exists when the Americans want something,’ a former Downing Street aide observed after Donald Trump rejected the Chagos Islands deal. There are profound differences between London and Washington over military action against Iran while the fourth anniversary of the war in Ukraine this week has exposed further fault lines. The result is that Anglo-American relations are at their worst point since the general election. Starmer’s team argues he should not be ousted at a time of huge international instability. But the reality of the Anglo-American relationship raises three questions. Where did things go wrong? Does the PM still have some kind of relationship with Trump?

In the last five years of his life, when I knew Richard Nixon, nothing described him better than Milton’s “calm of mind, all passion spent.” During the most tumultuous political career in American history he had come back many times, but the greatest comeback of all was in full swing. His enemies had seized control of the puritanical conscience of America to slay him, unjustly, and he was manipulating the same national conscience, which was founded on Plymouth Rock and has survived all the corruption and hypocrisy and violence of American public life, and when aroused, is insuperable. Since his political fall, and later his death, polls increasingly indicate public unease about the treatment of Richard Nixon.

Donald Trump spent much of the second half of last year boasting about the total and utter success of his military strikes on Iran. “As you know,” he said in August, “we took out the nuclear capability of Iran, and to use the term that people try to dispute without any knowledge, it was obliterated.” Iran’s nuclear program, he assured the world, had been set back by “decades.” Yet yesterday, just six months on, there he was again – meeting Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu once more to discuss the urgent need to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.