This is Dispatches, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper normally written by Patrick Cockburn. As Patrick is away, former BBC foreign correspondent Nick Bryant pens this newsletter.
If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
The summer of America’s semiquincentennial, the country’s 250th birthday, will go down as a season of national waning. All those gold trappings in the imperial capital recall the decadence, and decline, of Rome.
Donald Trump’s United States is becoming increasingly friendless. American isolationism is conventionally thought of as an active choice by the United States itself. Now, as the age of America comes to an end, it is being imposed from outside by other countries, including long-standing allies.
This week it was not the US President who was heralded as the leader of the free world, but the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who adopted the tone of a wartime leader in the trade dispute with Washington. “You’re at war when you’re attacked, and we got attacked,” said the former Bank of England governor, channeling his inner Churchill. Carney has dispensed with the deferential default adopted by so many Western leaders towards Trump and again opted for defiance.
