Both cases lay bare a striking truth: America doesn’t care about Britain. Ignoring the rule of law in other countries, airlifting alleged paedos at great cost, making mad promises about other people’s territory and being unable to remember any historical event that happened more than about five minutes ago are characteristics not of a global hegemon deserving of respect, but of a third-world dictator. Indeed, the tit-for-tat punishment mode of America’s foreign policy is even more third-world than it first seems. The current undermining of Britain seems a kneejerk reaction to our immediate refusal to join a foreign conflict which came at the instigation of Benjamin Netanyahu. The arguments of the US and Israel for publicly undermining British territorial integrity rely on the acceptance of a deranged and false equivalence. Are we meant to believe that Falkland Islanders are habitually going around beating up the people who used to live there or crushing the homes of long-established penguins beneath bulldozers? Of course, the specifics of what sparked America’s ire can seem almost irrelevant. Here, revenge for settlement sanctions involves supporting the territorial claims of Ireland, one of the most anti-Semitic countries in Europe. Trump recently made clear his view that the Falklands conflict was a long time ago. (He was, he says, ‘a very young boy’ at the time. He was 35.) Since then, in his eyes, we’ve been less pliant, so essentially deserve our comeuppance, ignoring the immense solidarity shown after 9/11, the sacrifices Britain made in Iraq and Afghanistan. This looks more like an expectation of vassalage than alliance; a demand that your ‘ally’ obeys at all times or their basic sovereignty will no longer be respected. The punishment of erstwhile friends runs in tandem with the indulgence of enemies: as Britain is threatened, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is offered concessions while Iran may soon be given a freer hand in the Strait of Hormuz. All this should serve as a wake-up call. Right-wing parties around the world have been punished at the ballot box for their pro-Americanism. Given US threats to Northern Ireland, the integrity of which first built the Conservative and Unionist party, and the Falklands, which shored up its power in the 1980s, this is an opportunity for the British right to rediscover a more sceptical realism. The President’s outbursts make conservatives still willing to go out to bat for him look ludicrous. They make Andy Burnham’s vow not to prioritise defence at the expense of welfare appear even more spineless, and the Chagos giveaway even more pathologically stupid. As that essential guide to US statecraft Henry Kissinger once quipped: ‘To be an enemy of America is dangerous but to be her friend is fatal.’ It’s time we listened.