JD Vance clearly dislikes Europe generally; but he appears to harbour a particular animus against Britain. Recently he was reported to be insisting on her abandoning her ‘hate speech’ laws, as a condition for the US’s entering into a commercial treaty with her. (See https://www.advocate.com/politics/us-uk-trade-deal-lgbtq.) Remember also what he said about Britain in a speech to a ‘Peace Conference’ in Munich this last February, accusing her of imprisoning people for ‘silently praying’, outside an abortion clinic. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYHjv7QnLLw.)

This was in order to illustrate his main argument: which was that the chief danger to Europe currently comes not from Russia or China or the Middle East, or from domestic terrorists, but ‘from within’. More specifically, it comes from ‘liberals’ and the so-called ‘wokerati’, who are seeking to limit ‘free speech’ (and prayer), in Britain especially. It’s all a question of ‘values’, which he claims used to be held in common between America and Europe, but no longer are. This – Liberalism, in its European and British form – now poses an existential danger to ‘Western civilisation’, no less; which it should therefore be the first priority of the Munich Peace Conference to address.

OK, that’s debateable (possibly); but in any event for Vance to use a pretty minor – and misunderstood – cultural and legal difference between the UK and America to interfere with a trade agreement between them, seems disproportionate. That’s especially so when Britain might point to cultural peculiarities on the American side which are arguably more problematical, like the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, and many of Trump’s recent query-Fascistic Executive Orders. ‘Motes and beams’ come to mind.

This however illustrates one new element that has entered into both domestic politics and international diplomacy since the rise of the Right in recent years. Values have sometimes – although not too often – played a part in foreign policy, usually in support of boycotts against nations that are felt to have offended against international standards of ‘human rights’; but usually deployed from the Left side of politics, and opposed by the ‘Realpolitiker’ Right. If Vance’s suggestion that we in Britain should be excluded from American markets because of our domestic laws is taken up, it could signal the arrival of a whole new system of global trade; and indeed of the relations between our two peoples generally.