"When my uncle was president, 3% of Americans had chronic disease. Today, 60% do. We have 66% of adults are diabetic or pre-diabetic, 38% of teens. When you and I were kids, Sean, the average pediatrician would see one case of juvenile diabetes in his lifetime, over a 40 or 50-year career. Today, one out of every three kids in his office door is diabetic or pre-diabetic.”

“Diabetes and other mitochondrial diseases are now costing America more than our military budget,” he continued. “We spend two to three times on healthcare than what other countries do, and we have the worst outcomes. And it’s not — and we have the best medical system in the world. We are poisoning ourselves and it’s coming from, you know, principally these ultra-processed foods and what we’re trying to do, and this President Trump wants us, to have radical transparency and to incentivize companies like this one to switch to traditional ingredients like beef tallow.”

Donald Trump’s America is putting itself first, reshaping the world, trashing allies and waging idiotic trade wars. Europe, mired in decadence and welfarism, is interested primarily in our military know-how, nuclear umbrella and, as always, our fisheries. Russia is a fascistic empire whose advances must be halted. China is a hostile civilisation. India doesn’t really care. International institutions and courts serve as useful idiots for proto-Marxists keen to destroy the West.

We comfort ourselves with tales of how we can serve as a bridge between Europe and the US, or build a coalition of the willing in Ukraine. It’s inspirational stuff, but it would be madness to cling to the certainties of the past. It’s time for a total reset of our assumptions, of our understanding of history, of our modus operandi, of our international role.

The Atlanticists and the pro-Europeans alike are wrong. We should be friendly to the US and EU, but beholden to neither. America saved Britain during World War I; it rescued us from totalitarianism in World War II; it destroyed Soviet tyranny in the Cold War. It earned the eternal gratitude of mankind. But those of us who love America must acknowledge how the US ruthlessly exploited its participation in the wars to demolish Britain’s financial, maritime and geopolitical power. It treats its allies as vassals, rather than equals.

The typical British worker would be £4,000 per year better off if productivity growth and wages in the UK had matched those of the US, said Max Mosley, economist at the Institute. “Economic stagnation over the past decade is now threatening the UK’s position as a place for a high standard of living. A combination of weak productivity growth driving near zero growth in real wages and cuts to welfare has resulted in a situation where we are neither delivering prosperity through high wages nor security through welfare,” he said. “That the poorest in our country now fare worse than those in nations once considered less affluent is a stark indictment of the UK’s economic social model.”

The irony, of course, is that Trump – persona non grata in polite European society – warned Germany back in 2018 that their dependence on Russian gas was a strategic liability. He was laughed at. Four years later, Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. It's incredible to see the same leaders who were content to let Putin pick apart Ukraine piece by piece until it was too late now decry Trump’s strong-arming and accuse him of appeasement.

Whatever security guarantees there are must be ironclad. Future Russian aggression must be deterred, not merely punished after the fact. And European leaders must take a hard look at their own failings – because, for all the condemnation of Trump’s tactics, his crude warnings about European negligence proved devastatingly accurate.

And here lies the uncomfortable truth: barring some unforeseen military miracle, Ukraine will likely have to cede the territory Russia now holds. Moscow won’t voluntarily withdraw, and Kyiv, despite its extraordinary resistance, is not winning. This is not fair, nor just – but it is reality. So, where do we go from here? A ceasefire is not a victory, nor is it justice. But the alternative – an endless war with no clear path to success – is worse.

No. There’s method here. The new administration is willing to risk a downturn – or “transition” – because it believes it can and must reset the US economy. The theory, tying together Right-wing anxieties about economics and culture, is that America is a drug addict, hooked on state spending/money printing and foreign imports. The stock market has been riding an unsustainable high triggered by Joe Biden’s handouts. Last week, at a speech in New York, Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, urged a “detox period” to kick these nasty habits.

“Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream,” he argued; it’s prosperity, mobility and security. The Trump tariffs are designed to be a foreign policy tool – ie, bully Mexico into policing its border – but also to generate revenue; shift from buying things from abroad to making them at home; and to punish bad behaviour by friends who dump their goods in the US market while penalising imports from America.

Trump is thus pursuing a classic conservative strategy of shifting power and wealth from the state to the private sector, with the long-term goal of deficit reduction. Bessent said: “If we bring back more manufacturing, if we have cheap energy, good tax policy, deregulate, we will end up with a strong dollar,” which one assumes also means minimal inflation. It’s this or declining growth and bankruptcy. A civilisational turning point.

Meanwhile, foreign firms, including US allies and even Taiwan, are helping fuel China’s naval expansion. Over 75% of the output from China’s top-tier shipyards is purchased by non-Chinese entities, meaning that the very countries that should be strengthening their own shipbuilding capabilities are indirectly contributing to China’s military buildup. This is an alarming reality. The more foreign capital that flows into these Chinese shipyards, the more China’s naval power grows, further tilting the balance of power in the Pacific and beyond.

The erosion of US and allied shipbuilding capabilities cannot be overstated. It’s not just a matter of losing production capacity — it’s about national security and economic stability. If America is to maintain its status as a global leader, it must stop enabling China’s rise and start rebuilding its own industrial base.

He told PLSA delegates: “With my historian hat on, if I was writing a history book in 100 years' time about these times, then chapter one would be the post-war world 1945 to 1990. That was the Cold War, a dangerous time, but a stable time in many ways."

He said: “Chapter two would be 1990 to about 2015 which was a very lucky quarter of a century to be around. We still had 9/11, we still had the political crisis. It wasn't completely trouble free, but we thought liberal democracies would continue.”

“But now we can see, from about 2015 onwards, Brexit, Trump, Russia, pushing back China, that we entered a new chapter, chapter three. Where chapter one was dangerous and chapter two was exciting, we are now in chapter three of our history, and it is exciting and dangerous at the same time, and that is a very different period of history that we are now going to be living through.”

War in Europe however, and the unreliability of the US as an ally means we have to accept that the post-1945 and the post-1989 Europes are gone.

So here we have a Europe that is and isn’t the EU; is and isn’t Nato – it is a “coalition of the willing”, united by a shared sense of threat, urgency and purpose but which cannot have a sole leadership figure. One country’s leader would never be accepted by others in the coalition, while the figurehead of an institution, be it the EU or Nato, would end up representing some but not all of the countries involved.

This is a new Europe, coordinated by leaders such as Macron, Starmer, the incoming German chancellor Friedrich Merz and Poland’s Donald Tusk. They share threat perceptions and the will to address them. After all, European countries, put together, are among the richest and most powerful in the world.

Murray said that Britain would not join the bloc’s effort and would instead push for an economic agreement between the UK and the US. He said: “We’re not going to retaliate immediately in that way. Obviously, the imposition of tariffs is disappointing, but we want to take a pragmatic approach and we’re already negotiating rapidly toward an economic agreement with the US with the potential to eliminate additional tariffs.

“We think that the best way for the UK to respond is with a cool-headed, pragmatic, productive response working with the US, but whilst at the same time making absolutely clear that we will stand up for British industry and all options are on the table.” Trump’s increased tariffs took effect on Wednesday as prior exemptions, duty-free quotas and product exclusions expired. The duty is extended to hundreds of products made from the metals, from nuts and bolts to soda cans.

William Bain, head of trade policy at the British Chamber of Commerce, said: “This is a difficult day for trans-Atlantic trade and plunges businesses, in both the US and UK, into a new age of uncertainty.”

Just 50 days later, about $2.7 trillion has been wiped off the aggregate market value of the so-called Magnificent Seven — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Nvidia and Tesla — as America’s most valuable public companies have become embroiled in the turmoil gripping US markets.

Fears that Trump’s aggressive trade policy and government job cuts could tip the world’s largest economy into recession were stoked further on Friday by weak government jobs data for February. The sell-off comes on the back of a stellar run for the Magnificent Seven since the start of 2023, turbo-charged by the clamour among investors for companies that promise to capitalise on the rise of artificial intelligence.

Britain and Australia have failed to secure get-out clauses, while Canada and the European Union say they will retaliate, raising the prospect of ongoing tit-for-tat economic hostilities. The tariffs are a major threat to UK steel exports - worth some £350 million a year - with the bulk coming from stainless steel. The US is a major importer of aluminium and steel with Canada, Mexico and Brazil among its largest suppliers.

Mr Trump hopes the tariffs will boost US steel and aluminium production as he presses ahead with a promise to make America an economic powerhouse. The tariffs in place today are designed to protect US manufacturing and bolster jobs by making foreign-made products less attractive.

CT scans can be life-saving tests, catching disease or bleeding early enough to be treated. However, experts say they are sometimes overprescribed and performed unnecessarily, potentially because of the money-making opportunities for the hospitals, as the tests are very expensive ($300-$6,000), or out of doctors' fears of missing a diagnosis and being sued.

Dr Rebecca Smith-Bindman, a professor at the University of California-San Francisco medical school, is one of the researchers in the 2009 and ongoing study. She told NBC News: 'It’s unfathomable. We keep doing more and more CTs, and the doses keep going up.' Dr Smith Bindman said between two machines, one could be exposing patients to 10 to 15 times higher radiation doses than the other.

She added: 'There is very large variation and the doses vary by an order of magnitude — tenfold, not 10 percent different — for patients seen for the same clinical problem.' About 93 million scans are performed in the US every year, according to IMV, a medical market research company - and that number is rising.