Given Donald Trump’s abasement before Vladimir Putin, it wasn’t the smartest move for the EU to compromise its free-trade principles in July’s tariff agreement for fear the US would stop backing Ukraine. As a string of people going back to New York construction and real estate companies in the 1970s could have told you, Trump doesn’t keep promises.

It’s now commonplace to say Trump’s shakedowns of trading partners and corporations for tax revenue (even entirely leaving aside the issue of his personal wealth) resemble a mafia boss or a crony-capitalist dictator in a developing country. It’s actually worse than that.

Good mafia bosses and efficient autocrats may be extractive, but they are predictable. Trump’s raids on companies and governments on behalf of the US Treasury are capricious — consider his reported demand that Switzerland buy off the US tariffs with investments and his sudden 15 per cent levy on the chip companies Nvidia and AMD’s semiconductor sales to China. They create uncertainty that weakens the entire basis of business and trade.