I love America and until recently, everything it stood for. I will also always be grateful to the United States. Not in the sentimental, flag-waving way that politicians reach for when they want easy applause, but in the serious way a country should acknowledge another that has repeatedly carried weight for the defence of the free world.

America helped win the Second World War. It shaped the post-war settlement. It made NATO credible. It deterred the Soviet Union, secured sea lanes, and anchored a Western alliance that delivered security and prosperity on a scale history rarely offers.

That gratitude is real. It is also exactly why I refuse to indulge Donald Trump.

Let me start with what I agree with, because caricature is a vice on both sides. I agree with Trump’s instinct to challenge Europe’s complacent elites. Too many European governments have spent the last two decades mistaking process for progress, regulation for strategy, and moral posturing for hard capability. We have talked endlessly about values while running down readiness. We have treated American patience as a permanent entitlement. Europe has freeloaded, and it has done so with a sanctimonious confidence that is as unattractive as it is unserious.

I also agree with Trump acting in America’s national interest. Every nation should. I wish Britain did more of it. And I understand the appeal of confidence and energy in leadership. Western politics is far too crowded with managerial technocrats who can recite frameworks and talking points but cannot inspire the public to accept that the world has changed. I do not want Britain led by timid caretakers who treat national drift as “stability”. In a harsher world, drift is a luxury.

So yes, I like strength. I like clarity. I like momentum over mush.

But strength without judgement is not strength. It is impulse. And impulse is precisely what makes Trump so dangerous.

This is where the British philosopher, Thomas Hobbes helps. Hobbes wrote Leviathan in the shadow of civil war, in 1651. His premise was brutally practical. When authority is weak, when covenants are not trusted, when institutions cannot compel restraint, society slides towards conflict and fear. People then seek a sovereign power strong enough to impose order, keep faith, and make agreements credible. The sovereign’s job is not to posture. It is to provide predictability and security. To reduce uncertainty. To make promises meaningful.

Trump’s approach does the opposite. He treats alliances as protection rackets, diplomacy as humiliation, and agreements as optional. He does not behave like a Leviathan that makes order possible. He behaves like the man who invites a return to Hobbes’s “state of nature”, where every actor assumes betrayal is coming, and therefore hedges, rearms, breaks ranks, and looks after itself. That may feel exhilarating to those who enjoy disruption. It is catastrophic for a coalition that depends on confidence, discipline, and a shared sense of purpose.

His latest remarks about the Second World War captured the problem in one ugly soundbite. He told European leaders that without the United States we would all be speaking German, and perhaps a little Japanese. It was delivered as if history is a personal trophy cabinet and alliances are a favour for which everyone must grovel.

That is vulgar. It is also historically illiterate.

Britain did not spend the Second World War hoping America would arrive and do the hard work. We were in from the start. We stood alone in 1940 while much of Europe had fallen and the United States was still outside the fight. We absorbed the bombing, rationing, the Battle of the Atlantic, and the strain of a global conflict fought across multiple theatres. Millions served from Britain and across the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth dead run to well over half a million. Those are not abstract numbers. They are names on headstones and memorials from Normandy to North Africa, from Italy to Burma, from the Arctic convoys to the skies over Europe.

If anyone wants a single-day reality check, look at D-Day. Around 156,000 Allied troops landed in Normandy on 6 June 1944. In the British and Canadian sector, 83,115 troops were landed, including 61,715 British troops, roughly 40 per cent of the total Allied landings that day. The naval picture is starker still. Of the 1,213 warships involved, around 892 were British. Of the 4,126 landing craft, around 3,261 were British. In the air, over 11,590 Allied aircraft were involved on D-Day, and 5,656 of these were Royal Air Force, close to half.

None of this diminishes America’s decisive contribution. American industrial scale, logistics, and eventual mass were critical. But serious people do not reduce a coalition victory to a one-country morality play. They do not use it as an excuse to sneer at allies eighty years later.

What makes Trump’s contempt even more offensive is that it erases the modern sacrifices Britain made when America asked its allies to stand with it.

NATO’s Article 5 was invoked only once, after 9/11. Britain answered that call. We fought in Afghanistan for two decades. We lost 457 British service personnel. Thousands were wounded or injured, many with life-changing consequences that did not disappear when the cameras moved on. In Iraq, 179 British Armed Forces personnel and Ministry of Defence civilians died on Operation TELIC. That is the price paid by a loyal ally. You do not get to take that loyalty, take those lives, and then belittle the very nations that showed up when you asked.

This is where the uncomfortable British truth bites, because it has been earned at moments. There have been times when Britain has acted less like an ally and more like a performing pet. We have sometimes confused closeness with submission, and loyalty with strategy. Iraq remains the most painful example. Our soldiers did their duty. Our politics too often lacked the scepticism and discipline that a serious country owes its own people.

The deeper post-war story matters too. Britain helped shape the modern world. We exported common law, parliamentary government, and the principle that power should answer to law. We built global networks of trade and finance. We also emerged from 1945 exhausted and indebted, forced to adjust to a new hierarchy in which American power was dominant. That dominance sometimes came with leverage that squeezed British choices. Suez was the moment the pretence collapsed, when American pressure made clear that Britain’s room for manoeuvre had shrunk. Great powers use their economic arsenal as well as their fleets. That is not a complaint. It is the real world. The lesson is not to sulk. The lesson is to rebuild British seriousness.

Even the detail about debt matters because it speaks to national character. Britain did not stop paying it’s war debt to America until it was repaid in full, with the final payment made in December 2006. Britain honoured its obligations. That is what serious countries do.

Now add the most important point of all. We are not living in 1944. We are living in a world shaped by the internet, cyber, platform power and artificial intelligence. Influence today is not merely measured in battalions and bombast, but in compute, energy resilience, semiconductor supply chains, cyber capability, research ecosystems, and the standards that govern emerging technology. The future will not be decided by who shouts loudest about the last war. It will be decided by who can build, secure and scale the next economy.

This is where Britain and America, at our best, have always been at our strongest. We are system-builders. We build rules, institutions, markets and technologies that other countries then rely upon. Britain did not merely provide sentiment and speeches to the modern world. We helped create the infrastructure of modern life. Packet switching, one of the crucial building blocks of modern digital networks, was developed in Britain. The World Wide Web was invented by a British scientist. The intellectual roots of modern computing and artificial intelligence run straight through Alan Turing. We are not just consumers of other people’s innovation. We produce it, and the world uses it.

Even if you strip away nostalgia and look coldly at achievement, the record is strong. By standard tallies, the United Kingdom ranks second globally by Nobel Prize laureates, with roughly 144 laureates attributed to the UK. That is not a parlour game. It is a reminder that Britain remains capable of world-leading science, medicine and discovery, if we choose to back it with serious policy and serious investment.

Which is why Trump’s posture is so dangerous. In an era when power is increasingly technological and informational, alliances are not charity and they are not theatre. They are strategic infrastructure. Credibility and coordination are not soft virtues. They are hard power. When a US president treats allies like props and shared history like a slogan, he is not making America stronger. He is making the West weaker.

I like strong leaders. I share Trump’s instinct that Europe’s elites have drifted into complacency and that nations must act in their own interest. I also agree the West has suffered too many technocrats who manage decline while calling it governance.

But Trump is the proverbial loud and disparaging American who knows the price of everything yet the value of nothing. He understands leverage in the narrow, transactional sense, but he does not understand the deeper value of credibility, trust and dignity in leadership. He turns alliances into resentments. He mistakes humiliation for negotiation. He spends credibility like it is an infinite resource.

And that is why, in the most conservative sense, Trump is neither conservative nor republican. Conservatism is stewardship, restraint, and respect for the institutional architecture that makes liberty possible. Republicanism is a commitment to the idea that leaders serve the state, not possess it. Trump’s politics is too often the opposite. It is personalism. It is contempt for constraint. It is governance as performance and loyalty as a substitute for truth.

Gratitude to America does not require obedience to Trump. In fact, gratitude demands honesty. If you genuinely value the United States, you should want it led by someone who understands that the alliances which multiplied American power are not burdens to be mocked, but assets to be led.

Britain should stop acting like a supplicant. Europe should stop freeloading. America should remain strong, serious and reliable.

That is why, plainly, Trump needs to lose. Not because America should be weaker, but because the West must be wiser.