The relationship between the United States and the rest of the Western world has grown increasingly fraught since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January.

It may only have been a few months ago, but it feels like a lifetime. It has that nightmarish quality of an eternity in Hell.

Increasingly unthinkable situations have proliferated on a daily basis. A week may be a long time in politics, but it turns out that three months is an aeon in history.

Citizens of historically friendly nations being detained at airports when attempting to enter the States. American academics fleeing their native land and seeking asylum in European exile. Traditional diplomatic and defense alliances ripped to shreds.

The new administration quickly took to chiding and bullying their own country’s allies in front of the world’s TV cameras. They escalated conflicts under the guise of stopping them. They looked to see how they could exploit crises to make a quick buck.

And they threatened to invade allied sovereign states.

The return of the Day-Glo sociopath was always going to have an emphasis on retribution. He’d made it clear during his re-election campaign that he intended his revenge upon his old enemies to be merciless and sweet.

Rivals would be trampled underfoot. All those world leaders who’d ridiculed him – and who’d censured his ham-fisted attempt at a coup by mob rule the last time he lost – would now feel his wrath.

He was back. Last time, it was petty and personal. This time, it was going to be war.

He had slept – but now he had woken, and the world would be sorry.

And so, the second day in April was to be what the MAGA maniacs called “Liberation Day”. But the unmitigated foolishness of Trump’s strategy might have made the day before that seem like a more appropriate date on which to launch America’s trade war with the rest of the world.

European leaders promised a “robust and calibrated response” to Trump’s tariffs. The United Kingdom’s rather more mildly spoken Prime Minister said that Britain was “preparing for all eventualities” and would “rule nothing out”.

The typically passionless Sir Keir also pledged to remain “calm and pragmatic” in the face of this act of economic aggression.

He insisted he wouldn’t be rushed into “knee-jerk” actions and wasn’t planning to take any options off the table. Other, of course, than a decision to be decisive.

It seems unlikely that this would have set the orangutan in the Oval Office to quaking in his malodorous rhino-skin boots. He’d probably have been perfectly happy to harvest the purulent effusions of Mr. Starmer’s simultaneously oleaginous and phlegmatic riposte to help style or feed his monstrous hair.

Of course, trade wars aren’t as immediately devastating as real wars. But they cost many thousands of jobs on all sides. They annihilate livelihoods and ways of life.

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They impact upon the economic and fiscal health of all participant nations, upon governments’ capacities to support public services, such as schools and hospitals, and upon the actual health of their populations.

And, as the USA discovered in the early 1940s, they can lead to real military conflict. No one is protected from the destruction wreaked by protectionism. It wrecks everything in its path.

It is the last refuge of the economically illiterate. And it is the opening gambit of those who, like Trump’s diabolical new best friend from the worlds of tech billions and movie villains, revel in the escalation of moral and material chaos, in the disruption of all those things which foster and enhance the common good.

On his boss’s Liberation Day, sales of the Muskrat’s cars slumped to their lowest level in three years. This may have been because it turns out that the kind of people who can afford overpriced luxury cars designed for drivers who have a conscience about climate change may also not be the greatest fans of a Nazi-saluting narcissist desperate to destroy public services and provoke World War Three.

On the same day, Wisconsin voters emphatically rejected a candidate for a vacant seat on their state’s supreme court, a right-winger whose campaign had been supported by Mr. Musk to the tune of $25 million.

At the same time, the 25 per cent tariffs his puppet/master placed that day on all car imports to the United States look like they may end up harming Musk’s own motor business even further when other countries retaliate in kind.

Indeed, Trump’s 10 per cent universal tariffs will almost certainly do unimaginable damage to the entire global economy.

Yet the British government was quietly relieved that the UK didn’t receive a worse punishment than that, a tribute to Sir Keir’s simpering sycophancy at the feet of the White House’s mobster-in-chief. But it will remain concerned about the economic disruption which will be caused by the 20 per cent tariffs hitting the European Union – a move condemned by EU leaders as a “major blow” to the world economy.

And the 54 per cent tariffs imposed on China (and China’s immediate promises to retaliate) look like they may eventually come to represent the greatest single threat to world peace seen since the start of this century.

The morning after Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement, the American stock market saw steep falls – including in the share value of such companies as Amazon, whose bosses had rushed in January to display their allegiance to King Donald at his inauguration.

A spokesperson for the White House advised the cowed wolves of Wall Street to “trust President Trump”. The laughter could be heard ringing hollowly all the way to Central Park.

Back in Britain, Sir Keir’s Business Secretary announced that the government would spend the rest of the month consulting stakeholders on “products that could be potentially included in any UK tariff response”.

He couldn’t have sounded any more New Labour – and any more noncommittal – if he’d handed round red roses and said he was considering setting up a few focus groups, with free herbal tea and cranberry juice for all participants.

Yet alongside all this weak tea and sympathy, let us spare a thought for the lands most grievously affected by these tariffs.

I refer, of course, to the Heard and McDonald Islands, an Antarctic territory inhabited only by penguins and seals.

Despite having no external trade at all, not even (as far as we know) the occasional herring passed between a local gull and a passing albatross, the terrestrial residents of these islands have been hit with the Washington swamp-beast’s so-called “reciprocal” tariffs.

Ironically, though, while we might feel sorry for those blameless souls, innocent of all the trappings of our politics and economics, we might one day come to envy their fate – as those remote and uninhabited islands, so isolated from the impacts of our species upon this world, might at last, after the wars the American president seems so determined to provoke, be the one last place on the planet that could sustain human life.