BASTARDS. Thus a nameless British official reportedly responded to the dramatic efforts initiated last week by the US government to end the Ukraine war.

The official was referring to the leaders of the USA.

You would need a heart of stone not to laugh, as Oscar Wilde wrote of the death of Little Nell. Sounds like the “special relationship” needs a trip to Relate.

A British government so subservient to Washington that it even allows fears of Elon Musk’s tweets to dictate elements of domestic policy, while maintaining an unqualified subservience on foreign affairs come hell, high water or genocide and refraining absolutely from the smallest criticism of any preposterous Trumpian excess – annex Canada! Invade Greenland! Expel Palestinians! –  has now been left standing like a jilted lover, clutching wilted roses in the rain while the heartthrob runs off with another.

It can, however, seek solace in company. The entire prevailing establishment across the Nato world has been unhinged by Donald Trump’s approach to Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine after three years which have been catastrophic for all involved.

Why they are so shocked is a mystery.

When the Fox News host presently doing front-of-camera service at the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, travelled to Europe to give the message that enough was enough he was only speaking sense, quite possibly for the first time in his life.

Ukraine cannot restore its 2014 borders by military means. Nor will it gain Nato membership, since no peace agreement could be reached on that basis.  

Recognising those realities is what the Chinese would call seeking truth from facts, or the US Declaration of Independence self-evident truths.

Yet those are facts the high heid yins of centrist imperialism have declined to acknowledge, as if by closing their eyes reality would disappear.

They don’t like the Trump negotiating style? They had plenty of time to initiate their own, while Biden was still purportedly in charge, or at least reading out the script his handlers put before him in his lucid intervals.

Yet they preferred to comfort themselves with slogans, an abdication with real world consequences as blood and money was poured away in a conflict which, recent Russian battlefield ascendancy notwithstanding, still screams stalemate.

“Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine” was one such slogan, and its justice cannot be denied. But what was happening with Ukraine?

The Zelensky administration could offer no plan for winning the war, nor one for ending it. It appeared to be waiting for something or someone to turn up, but Micawberism loses its strategic mojo when someone else is picking up the bill for procrastination.

Nor did Ukraine’s president do himself any favours by taking time out last week of all weeks to announce fresh punitive sanctions against his political opponents, including his predecessor Pyotr Poroshenko.  

Not such a good look when your marketing pitch is as the only redoubt between democratic Europe and Putinite authoritarianism.

If peace in Ukraine spells trouble for the champions of transatlantic world hegemony, such sorrows came not singly but in battalions last week.

For Hegseth did not stop there. He blandly advised the assembled satraps who still believe they count as “allies” that the US was no longer very interested in Europe’s defence.

Next off the plane was JD Vance, who told an audience, already punch-drunk, that they were the problem, not Russia, in a speech that mixed inane Tucker Carlson talking points, an outstretched hand to the German far right and palpably reasonable complaints, such as concerning the arbitrary cancellation of Romania’s presidential election last December.

As politicians do in moments of shock, the hearers defaulted on their favourite cliches.  

France’s Macron says now is the moment for Europe to step up, take responsibility for its own defence, while the British government claimed it could still be a “bridge” between Europe and the US.

Don’t bet on either happening. The Trumpians are demanding 5 per cent of GDP on military spending, a figure so at odds with budgetary circumstances that it could only be approached if, as a first step, every bond trader on the planet were locked up without telephone or internet access.

A pleasing prospect but outside the range of what we might, deploying our own cliches, call the present balance of class forces.

As for the London Bridge, it will go the way the song said, albeit through eroded foundations rather than weight of crossing traffic.  

Britain did not escape Vance’s strictures, the vice-president being probably less susceptible to the charms of Prince William (or Peter Mandelson) than his boss. Tariffs and other inconveniences are likely coming our way.

What Trump, Vance and Hegseth want is by no means obscure. Evidence surfaces daily. Even Zelensky was moved to rebellion by Washington’s demand that he immediately surrender half of Ukraine’s mineral resources to US interests in recompense for the wherewithal already supplied to continue the fight with Russia, with no security guarantees in return.

As with Trump’s obscene ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza, replacing Palestinians with golf courses and condominiums – a proposal which does indeed suggest that the president has taken to heart his time spent in the Scottish Highlands, where the clearance of peoples to make room for more profitable undertakings has a history – the brazenness is breath-taking.

Ukraine may find mortgaging its sovereignty to Washington more agreeable than to Moscow, but the price is still eye-watering.

And there’s more. Announcing that it would no longer enforce anti-bribery legislation in the US, the White House said “national security depends on America and its companies gaining strategic commercial advantages around the world.”

And in snubbing the Artificial Intelligence communique signed in Paris, Vance laid out the rationale: “The Trump administration will ensure that the most powerful AI systems are built in the US, with American-designed and manufactured chips.”

So there it is. Uncle Sam wants your resources, your markets by hook or if not crook, while shutting you out of the US whenever the preservation of US supremacy requires it.

If you imagine yourself an ally, or are among the platoons of politicos who have built their entire career around dancing to the US tune, Trump has just three words for you: suck it up.

Not an approach that can work universally. There is no sense yet that the new administration has settled on its approach to China, beyond determining that there is the real threat to US hegemony, from a socialist not a capitalist rival.

Trump is extracting himself from European commitments to focus there, no doubt, but so far is not teeing himself up for a win. Even Britain’s unctuous Foreign Secretary David Lammy found his voice to dissent over the near-closure of the USAid agency – on the grounds that it would leave vacancies for Chinese assistance to fill in Africa.

It is possible that at least part of the rationale behind making eyes at Putin is to woo him away from China by offering Russia and its dominant oligarchy renewed access to Western markets, and their own marooned yachts and empty Knightsbridge apartments.

This is a world of great power conflict, of spheres of influence, of division and redivision, first through tariffs and then through artillery. Of course, we have been here before. But it is a new world for everyone raised either in the era of US unipolarity or the preceding Cold War.

The left needs to articulate answers, because the headless chickens in the chancelleries of Europe and the scrambled brains in the think tanks of liberal centrism surely have none.

A start would be demanding a British diplomacy that disengages from the US and Trump’s genocidal fantasies and promiscuous menaces, while embracing some form of all-inclusive security arrangements for Europe, extending a hand to the global South, seeing China as a friend not a rival and promoting nuclear disarmament.

Starmer will not turn in that direction, but then the US has no monopoly on bastards and we need to address those close to hand first of all.