• Britain’s exporters at a loss over US tariff turmoil

For nations as well as individuals there’s such a thing as self-respect. In our approach to an elderly and vicious occupant of the White House whose mental powers are disintegrating, the United Kingdom’s refusal to condemn, or to support the EU’s willingness to retaliate, looks more and more like a kowtow where a stiff bow should be our closest approach to civility.

And the Tories — always keen to grovel to America — are following suit. It was depressing on Friday to hear their spokesman, Andrew Griffith, interviewed on the BBC’s Today programme, painfully duck the question of who was to blame for turmoil in world markets. Everybody knows who, but ministers and shadow ministers are under orders not to say anything disobliging about the man who was last week crowing that world leaders were “lining up to kiss my ass”. Whom could Trump have been referring to? Can Starmer’s flourish of a royal invitation, lips all but puckered for the unsavoury encounter, have been absent from the president’s list?

There is something to be said for keeping open lines of communication with an important world power, even when that power is a foul-mouthed bully. But there’s a difference between, on the one hand, biting our lip on behalf of the team — our European and Commonwealth allies as well as half of Asia — and, on the other, taking the knee in forlorn hopes of preferential treatment for ourselves alone. “Carve-out”. What a revealing expression. Britain’s attempts to carve out, just for our country, some kind of exemption from Donald Trump’s punishing trade tariffs strike me as shabby.

• Smartphones and laptops excluded from Trump tariffs

After “carve out” I nominate “nobody wins from a trade war” as my second infelicitous expression of the month. I’m hearing it everywhere: Starmer repeated it last week on a visit to the northeast. If advanced (as he seemed to be doing) as a justification for failing to hit back, it is dangerous nonsense. Self-defence is the only way to deal with bullies. Of course if an aggressor hits you and you don’t hit back, less immediate violence will result. But the lesson the bully learns is that he can hit without fear of retaliation. The threat to retaliate is what we call deterrence.

This is why we maintain armed forces and nuclear submarines. On the basis that “nobody wins from a war”, we could replace the Ministry of Defence with a white flag. The threat of reprisal is often the best way of keeping the peace; and for the threat to be credible there must sometimes be occasions when it is shown not to be hollow.

This is why Donald Trump (and, perhaps more importantly, those around him who advise and try to restrain him) must be made aware that the rest of the world will fight back. Anticipating that prospect, the bond markets last week gave Trump a massive thumbs-down. Retaliation being the only language a bully understands, he duly paused his tariff threats. “Nobody wins from a trade war” is not an argument for bending the knee. It’s an argument for making a credible threat to retaliate.

Britain and our allies should be huddled together in the fiercest of defensive packs. We face agonising decisions, of which the most difficult is whether we should pivot to China. Illustrating why not, Saturday’s Commons debate on the Scunthorpe steelworks should be a sharp reminder. So should the Lib Dem MP Wera Hobhouse’s exclusion from Hong Kong.

Perversely (you may think) I draw some comfort from Jingye’s bizarre attempts at a scorched earth exit from the steelworks it had owned. What crass incompetence! Is this part of the red dragon’s fiendish plan? Jingye’s antics were counterproductive, and would have been even if they had succeeded. As was the barring of Hobhouse, who represents no imaginable threat to Chinese security and was merely trying to visit her newborn grandson in Hong Kong.

Who advised Beijing to bar an obscure MP whose Westminster boss happens to be the only British party leader to call on the government to stand up to Trump and his tariffs? Did President Xi know about Jingye’s idiotic plans, or Hobhouse’s family visit, even as Admiral Sir Tony Radakin extended that surprising hand of friendship to his Chinese counterparts on an official visit and the trade minister Douglas Alexander flew in for unpublicised talks? How was this sensible for a China eager to seize the extraordinary opportunity Trump has created to split the rest of the West from America?

Xi appears unfamiliar with the advice “softly, softly, catchee monkey”. We always tend to overestimate our adversaries and one does begin to wonder whether China’s intelligence services have any grasp of the way western minds work, and whether the left hand knows what the right hand is doing in Beijing. We should sup with China — if sup at all — with a very long spoon, and for another reason too.

The tariff nightmare may yet prove a flash in the pan. It has become fashionable in recent weeks to opine that the world has changed, profoundly and permanently. Keir Starmer himself has said so. But it’s far too early to reach any such apocalyptic conclusion.

One demented US president (and hardly the first) may soon be hobbled by a collapsed rapprochement with Russia, increasingly audible doubts among senior courtiers, peeling business support, a restive Congress, a loss of Republican Party faith, floundering departmental secretaries, sinking opinion polls and the approach of next year’s mid-term elections.

We may look back on the summer of 2025 as an exceptionally nasty interlude that will leave its scars. But a world transformed? Steady on.