ACCIDENTAL EMPIRE:

The US is a reluctant behemoth, not an imperial power. The danger for us Europeans is not of too much transatlantic intervention in our affairs but of too little. It's demonstrated in comments this week by Kay Bailey Hutchison, the outgoing US ambassador to Nato. Ms Hutchison told Sky News that Mr Trump "has come to the realisation that Nato is very valuable". She added that, if re-elected, Mr Trump will honour the commitment requiring all Nato member-states to come to the defence of another if called upon to do so.

These are extraordinary comments, as they indicate that the free world has been led for nearly four years by a man who does not understand the nature, let alone the necessity, of collective security. Throughout his period of office, Mr Trump has demonstrated that he is at ease with autocrats, such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un, while despising democratic allies. He's previously claimed, in defiance of the evidence of Russia's alteration of the boundaries of Europe by force and use of nerve agent in a British city, that Nato is "obsolete". We now know that he regards a treaty obligation, specified under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, as purely optional. His presidency thereby undermines Western defence and effective deterrence.

That's why large numbers of Republicans who've served in national security posts in government back Mr Biden. (They include an old friend and debating partner of mine, Colleen Graffy, who served in the GW Bush administration.) Mr Trump's hostility to collective security demonstrates also just how fanciful is the notion that Europeans are subjugated by the US through our security alliances. And this has been a constant theme of the radical left in the post-war era.

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