From defence to trade, the incoming US president is upending the old order – and standing apart from our neighbours leaves us dangerously exposed

It’s one damn thing after another. As Keir Starmer is discovering, government, like life, can feel like a fusillade of events, each coming faster than the one before. If it’s not a cabinet minister resigning over a past fraud conviction, it’s MPs voting for assisted dying – and that’s just in one day. Through that blizzard of news, it can be hard to make out the lasting changes in the landscape – even those that have profound implications for our place in the world.

The November 2024 event that will have the most enduring global impact is the election of Donald Trump. There are some in the higher reaches of the UK government who are surprisingly relaxed about that fact, reassuring themselves that, in effect, we got through it once, we’ll get through it again. Yes, they admit, Trump has nominated some crazy people to lead in areas crucial to the UK-US relationship, such as defence and intelligence, but don’t worry, officials in London will do what they did last time: work with like-minded counterparts in the Washington bureaucracy to bypass the Trump loyalists at the top.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist