A month into his second term, Trump’s policies look like the 1960s spaghetti western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Taking a chainsaw to government waste and kicking biological men out of women’s sport are obviously good. Less obviously to Maga fans, old-fashioned tariffs protecting steel and aluminium that make US cars less competitive threaten rather than protect American jobs and consumers and are bad. As for the ugly, look no further than Trump’s foreign policy.

Calling Zelensky a modestly successful comedian is like calling Ronald Reagan a modestly successful actor. True, but both are greater presidents than Trump at present – a modestly successful game show host.

As for calling Zelensky a dictator who started the war with Russia, it conjures up Biden wandering on stage and introducing Zelensky as Putin. The Babylon Bee joked that when Trump realised he’d mixed the two up he came up with a ‘revised peace plan’ to take over both Ukraine and Russia as new territories. Yes, even for Maga’s favourite Christian satire site, Trump is a laughing stock. As the Donald might say, sad.

Unfortunately, Trump’s peace plan is not just a bad joke. History-challenged fans might claim that he is playing four-dimensional chess but in cosying up to Putin, Trump is poised to repeat the disastrous mistake Roosevelt made in the Crimean coastal resort of Yalta almost exactly 80 years ago in February 1945 when he sat down with Stalin and Churchill to carve up post-war Europe.

Roosevelt’s deluded New Deal liberalism and virulent anti-colonialism made him sideline Churchill as a British imperialist, blind to the threat, that Churchill recognised, of Stalin’s ambitions to expand his Soviet empire in Europe.

Roosevelt also underestimated the extent to which the Soviet Union was economically and militarily drained and demoralised  after losing over 27 million people because of the merciless way in which the paranoid Stalin waged war on his perceived internal as well as his real external enemies.

Far from operating from a position of strength, the collectivisation of agriculture and the central planning of industry had weakened the Soviet Union almost to the point of collapse. General Patton and Churchill wanted to push through and liberate East Germany, Poland and Eastern Europe but Roosevelt opposed them deluding himself that he would entice Stalin into a peaceful, American-led liberal democratic order and that Stalin would keep his vague promises to hold free elections in Eastern Europe which he had no intention of honouring. Thus, Roosevelt ushered in the Cold War and condemned half of Europe to the tender mercies of the Soviet Union for almost half a century.

So, here we are, 80 years later, with the US President playing footsies with a Russian dictator, blind to the evils and weakness of the strong man he admires and casting his European allies as the enemy.

Like his hero, Stalin, Putin has waged a ‘meat grinder’ war in Ukraine, increasing Russian casualties and thanks to rampant corruption, troops are poorly equipped, with malfunctioning weapons. An estimated 800,000 Russian troops are dead or wounded, with enormous material losses. Hundreds of thousands of young men have fled the country to dodge Putin’s deadly draft, which, coupled with the alcoholism and demographic decline Putin’s policies encourage, has shrunk the workforce.

Emblematic of Russia’s weakness was its inability to prop up Assad in Syria, an asset since the 1970s and its hurried departure from its bases.

Putin’s predilection for poisoning, defenestrating or otherwise disposing of critics and opponents has led to a circle of advisers who are corrupt, brutal sycophants amplifying his mistakes. Yet what Putin has bet the house on and may get right is Trump handing him a victory in Ukraine on a platter.

In this, as Sir Alex Younger, head of MI6 (2014 to 2020) has pointed out, Trump has form. In his first term, he trumpeted to the Taleban that he would give away Afghanistan in exchange for security guarantees that weren’t worth a young girl’s chance in the Islamist hell that inevitably followed. Trump pinned the fiasco – the Taleban’s cakewalk into Kabul that emboldened Putin to invade Ukraine – on Biden.

This time around he will own what will happen if he gives away Ukraine, as if it is nothing more than an unattractive plot on which he is not interested in building a Trump Tower. This has been reinforced by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth saying it was unrealistic for Ukraine to join Nato much less return to its pre-2014 borders and Trump countenancing Chinese peacekeepers enforcing the deal.

This is risible. China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, aka the Crinks, are an axis of autocrats. Putin’s goal is not to acquire land but to extinguish Ukrainian sovereignty and hand over what’s left after he carves it up to a puppet president. China, if Russia lets them enter, would help exploit Ukraine’s assets for the benefit of Putin and Xi Jinping.

The point is this deal richly rewards Russia for invading Ukraine and in doing so signals the end of the rules-based international order that has prevailed under American leadership since the end of the second world war and the beginning of a new world order based on ‘might is right’ in which Russia, China and the US dominate in their spheres of influence.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán foreshadowed this in a speech in Băile Tușnad, Romania, in July last year, a location Hungary longs to reunite with when it makes the Hungarian Empire great again, presumably in a post-Nato Europe dominated by Russia, where China rises and the US shrinks to dominate only in its hemisphere. This would be a massive loss of influence for the US but might appeal to US isolationists and soi-disant realists in Trump’s camp.

Phillip Roth – who predicted in The Human Stain, in 2000, the cruel absurdity of woke cancel culture – wrote four years later, in The Plot against America, about the dangers of American isolationism. He imagined an alternative second world war where Charles Lindbergh – the man who admired Germany’s strength and championed the isolationist ‘America First’ movement, whose followers included Henry Ford – becomes president. The parallels with a president who admires Putin’s ‘strength’ backed by the Henry Ford of our times – Elon Musk – are uncomfortable.

The irony is that the West is far stronger than the Crinks. China has been weakened by its infrastructure bubble it dare not burst; Russia and Iran through military overreach; North Korea through sclerotic communism in one family; and all by centrally-planned corruption and tyranny.

Given this, there is nothing inevitable about this new world order. Only Trump can make Russia great again. The possibility is making Putin smile like an ageing sabre-toothed tiger and emboldened China last week to conduct its gunboat diplomacy off Australian shores.

It would be rich irony indeed if a president who ushers in a ‘little US’ did it in the misguided belief it would make America great again.