TRUMP is the US’s Nero. His elevation to the office of president in 2016 was not the aberration his liberal detractors argued. Rather it was a symptom of US imperial decline, the first seeds of which were planted with the evacuation of the US Embassy in Saigon in 1975, setting in train a process that was deferred by the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s after Moscow’s own Vietnam in Afghanistan in the 1980s ended in similar fashion.

The invasion of Iraq by US military forces and its British ally came over a decade into the US’s unipolar moment, when imbued with triumphalism and End of History hubris, the George W Bush neocon administration set about shaping the world in its own image with the objective of establishing a new Pax America.

Iraq was intended as the first of what was envisaged would be a domino effect to assert complete dominance over the strategically vital Middle East in conjunction with its Israeli and Saudi allies, thus injecting an increasingly untenable hyper-capitalist economic model with the invaluable input of new natural resources and the expanded output offered by new markets.