“Ever Been Had?” I can’t get that question out of my head. It’s British-English for, “Fooled you, sucker.” I grew up when it was the punchline used by pranksters in The Beano.

It was also the title of a very early animated film by Dudley Buxton, made in 1917, in the darkest days of World War I. Set in a dystopian future (the year 1967), it features “the last Englishman,” who explains how “signing a premature peace” had allowed the Germans to develop new and deadly weapons while England slept. So completely had the Germans’ new mobile artillery and ray guns destroyed the Royal Navy and London itself, that only one Englishman survived.

There is something haunting about that old cartoon. It is not too hard to imagine, in the year 2075, “the last American” explaining how signing a premature peace with the Russians—and perhaps also the Chinese—had given the authoritarian powers the time they needed to overthrow the mighty United States.

The foreign policy of the Trump administration increasingly reminds me of Toby Young’s book title: “How To Lose Friends and Alienate People.” Two months in, and the President has managed to alienate just about every member of the Group of Seven, and most members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union. Yet his personal emissary, Steven Witkoff, seems inordinately keen to get along with the people I had previously considered America’s adversaries.