The US has chosen the worst possible moment and the worst possible way to say it, but it is right to call for a realignment

It’s tough being rightwing these days. You have to find something nice to say about Donald Trump. That is hard. He thinks Kyiv started the Ukraine war and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is a “dictator”. But what about JD Vance? The US vice-president thinks that Europe’s “threat from within”, which is putting “free speech … in retreat”, is worse than any threat from Russia or China. These men are deranged. What more is there to say?

The answer is quite a lot. John Stuart Mill warned that “he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that”. We must try to understand the case they are making, whether we agree with it or not.