So, what happens now?

There is general agreement that last Friday’s White House meeting was a disaster. Nothing like that has ever occurred in the Oval Office. It was the sort of way in which Stalin might have treated one of his colleagues, before ordering him to be taken off and shot. The Western Alliance: what Western Alliance?

Today, everything is more uncertain than it has been since the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, when Adolf Hitler declared war on the US. Since then, despite occasional problems, the European allies who came to form Nato have more or less assumed that they could take the Americans for granted. Western Europe would be protected against the Soviet threat, both nuclear and conventional. Starting with the Marshall Plan, our transatlantic cousins created a benign economic framework. The horrors of war receded. Europe recovered and rebuilt.

In retrospect, it seems surprising that these arrangements worked so smoothly: a partnership between European complacency and American tolerance. I remember a conference, circa 1980, attended by European Atlanticists and Conservatives and like-minded Yanks, among whom was a splendid old girl called Midge Decter, prominent in that most fruitful political coalition, Southern Baptists – Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority – and Manhattan Neo-Conservatives, many of them Jewish. In an earlier decade, Midge had said that she could never vote Republican, because their grandfathers had tried to stop her grandfathers from coming in. By 1980 and the epiphany of Ronald Reagan, all that had been forgotten.

‘You are the Jewish wing of the Moral Majority,’ I once said to her. She paused. ‘Yes, I guess we are.’ But Midge was by no means free of suspicions about old Europe. Too much bad history. Equally, she did not believe that Europeans were making a big enough contribution to their own defence. At one stage during the conference, she asked a question along those lines: ‘Do you all want us Americans to stay in Europe?’ Yes we did: of course we did. ‘Then you’re going to have to ask us real nice.’ By and large, most Europeans never did. They contented themselves with patronising the Americans, deploring their lack of culture and blithely assuming that they would always stick around.

Blithe assumptions: deplorable culture: Donald Trump. The tragedy has befallen Ukraine, but it would be easy to argue that the European Allies have got what they deserve. After the mishaps of the Boer War, Kipling declared that we British had suffered ‘no end of a lesson’. Now it is Nato’s turn.

Let us try a seemingly bizarre intellectual experiment: to see the world through JD Vance’s eyes. First of all, the Vice President has a powerful intellect. ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ is probably the best book ever written by a President or Veep. It is a moving work, unsparing in its descriptions of poor peoples’ sufferings: their hard-scrabble existence. Let us assume that Vance does not see why US taxpayers – including the hillbillies – should pay for Europe’s defence, while the Europeans prefer to spend money on welfare, not available to those whom Vance grew up with. Fair enough. But that does not justify the invasion of Ukraine.

It is not clear why the Vice President was so determined to take against President Zelensky. One has to remember that many Appalachians, such as Vance, come from Ulster Protestant stock: a tribe who are notorious for economising on charm. It was as if Vance had reverted to his roots and was behaving as if he were at a Democratic Unionist Party conference.

Right, but what now? First, the Europeans will clearly spend more on defence. Yet they have also made it clear that they will continue to rely on the US. It is not only Trump who believes in flaunting his poker hand before play begins. Second, there are going to be negotiations between the Russians, the Europeans and Ukraine. In this, we ought to be realistic. The Ukrainians are not going to recover all the territory which they have lost.

If these negotiations include a deal on rare earths, that could help to finance the rebuilding of Ukraine. So could the confiscation of sequestered Russian assets. This raises another crucial question. What sort of mood is Vladimir Putin now in?

After Barack Obama’s red lines – barely pink and dissolved in a light drizzle – came Joe Biden’s scuttling from Kabul. Yes: it had been Trump’s policy, but it is hard to believe that he would have exposed his country to a similar degree of humiliation had he executed it. Moscow must have observed America’s weakness. Moreover, it seems likely that Putin’s intelligence people will have told him what he wanted to hear. He may very well have concluded that he could conquer Ukraine.

So would he now be able to assure his own populace that they have won a great victory? Or would the casualties and the costs destroy his standing? Would his own security arrangements be strong enough to keep him in power? Above all, might he be emboldened to have another crack at Ukraine in a few months’ time? That somehow seems unlikely, but we cannot be sure.

We are in a world full of unknown unknowns, not least the personality of Donald Trump. What will he do next? Does he know?

But there has been one benign development. This column has not had a single good syllable to say about Keir Starmer and on domestic matters, that is likely to continue. But his recent performance on Ukraine has been faultless. That is how a British Prime Minister ought to behave.

Someone else also deserves plaudits (though, for what it is worth, I always thought that he would do well). Peter Mandelson praising Donald Trump: the acme of Machiavellian cunning – virtually an aesthetic exercise. Some jumped-up pipsqueak of a very junior minister complained, no doubt trying to prove that David Lammy is not the stupidest fellow in the Foreign Office. Mandelson will be reinforced by Jonathan Powell, a scion of that great dynasty, and by John Bew, still available for consultation. All that is reassuring – and by God we could do with some reassurance.

Bruce Anderson is a political commentator and freelance journalist.

Columns are the author's own opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of CapX.