“Isolationism” is the lazy term often applied to the attitude now found among Democrats and Republicans alike. It is true that the US has a history of periodically withdrawing into its own vast continental indifference, as it did after the first world war. But this time feels different. While the current withdrawalism undoubtedly drinks from some of those traditional wells, it flows through a country not brashly rising on the world stage but fearfully conscious of relative decline. Back in the 1920s, Americans were not worried about a rising China eating their lunch – and then buying the hamburger stall. They are now…

I am writing this column on the 12th anniversary of the 11 September terrorist attacks which launched the US into that decade of war – justifiably, in the immediate response to al-Qaida in Afghanistan, unjustifiably and disastrously in Iraq. This is a very different America now.

Maybe after some years spent putting its own house in order it will come back as the – for all its many faults and hypocrisies – indispensable anchor of some kind of liberal international order. Yet given not just its structural domestic problems but above all the changing global power constellation around it, I doubt it. To the many critics and downright enemies of the US in Europe and across the globe, I say only this: if you didn’t like that old world in which the US regularly intervened, just see how you like the new one in which it does not.