TALKS begin in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday between the US and Ukraine following last week’s vituperative exchange between Trump and Zelensky.

This is a second chance for Zelensky to reach an accommodation with his country’s main patron and the source of much of the military hardware, munitions and electronic intelligence which has enabled his embattled and largely conscript army to keep the Russian army occupied for three years.

It is clear that Zelensky missed the point of the meeting, whether on the basis of his own understanding, or perhaps with his expectations inflated by Keir Starmer’s blowhard bid to recruit a European army.

Rather than another handout, Trump left the Ukrainian President with very little wriggle room.

Zelensky went home empty handed with Trump’s words: “You’re gambling with World War III, and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country” ringing in his ears.

We don’t need to take Trump’s words as the complete and unvarnished expression of his entire worldview. He may be playing to that very substantial part of his electoral base and political support that is as tired of foreign wars as foreigners are of the US military.

But it is clear that a substantial part of the US elite, and for the moment that element which exercises executive power, sees a greater advantage, possibly strategic and certainly commercial, in Ukraine’s mineral and agricultural riches. In such a robber’s bargain, Trump may have found a willing partner in Vladimir Putin.

In the complex geometry of the fast-changing geopolitical world Saudi Arabia is renegotiating its position in the world, flirting with the Brics, offering itself as an interlocutor in the regional and wider conflicts in which it exists and has, for three years now, presented itself as a willing host.

In as far as systematic thinking is visible in Trump’s often transactional and invariable confused positioning a firm accommodation with Saudi and US interests is integral to the management of the general Middle East crisis and to the Palestine question especially.

Next weekend, Starmer will host an online conflab to breathe life into his shaky bid to build a Europe-plus alliance to replace the US as the guarantor of a hostile state entity on Russia’s flank.

His efforts have been rewarded by a token agreement from Australia, comfortably remote from immediate consequences but there has been a marked reluctance, even from those EU states who pitched up to his conference last weekend, to supply boots on contested Ukrainian soil. To this is added absolute opposition from some and a goodbye to EU unanimity.

Defence Secretary John Healey has the demeaning task of explaining away the absolute disjuncture between the unequivocal words of the US president and Starmer’s fantasy rhetoric.

Fixer McFadden was sent out to square the circle. When asked if the decision of the US to stop sharing satellite intelligence with Ukraine was wrong, his evasions illustrated all too clearly how vestigial is the “special relationship” and how fragile is the prospect of a campaign to keep Zelensky in office and Ukrainian troops on the front line.

This war will end with an even more costly Ukrainian defeat or a negotiated agreement.

It is clear that the post-war basis on which the US kept European states in an unequal military pact has ended. Britain out of the European Union is somewhat detached from the Nato/EU military pact but out of Nato, our country could be both safer and a real force for peace.

This entails a complete break from Labour’s servile submission to an outdated war mentality.

Let Europe be a zone of peace.