Suicidal hostility and the fall of the American empire: The price of paranoid conservatism (Nick Cohen, Aug 28, 2026, Writings from London)
In ways I do not believe most of us have grasped yet the perverse logic of paranoid conservatism leads Trump to embrace the West’s enemies, and leads Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen to do the same.
If you believe your allies are cheats, who have been ripping off honest Americans since 1945 with one-sided trade deals and defence alliances, what then of America’s actual enemies?
If America’s allies are “the worst countries in the world”, the countries that genuinely are the world’s worst cannot be so bad.
Suicidal hostility turns friends into enemies and enemies into friends. Just as the man who insists that benefit claimants are cheats whitewashes the behaviour of sweatshop employers so the superpower that insists its allies are swindlers, whitewashes the behaviour of its enemies.