“If you don’t get out of Port Said tomorrow, I’ll cause a run on the pound and drive it down to zero.” So said Dwight D Eisenhower to Anthony Eden in November 1956, at the height of the Suez crisis, the lowest point in the post-war relationship between the US and the UK – until now, that is.

Seventy years on, the symmetries between that geopolitical stand-off and the present fracture in the Western alliance are uncanny. Once again, the US president is threatening Britain – as well as, in this case, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Finland – with economic sanctions until he gets his way.

In 1956, Eisenhower demanded that Israel, France and Britain cease their military campaign to wrest back control of the Suez Canal, which had been nationalised in July by the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Today, it is Trump who wants to seize Greenland, presently an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, which is, in turn, a valued member of Nato.

Though Eisenhower had forged a warm friendship with Eden during the second world war, he did not hesitate to apply pressure to the prime minister, pausing plans to supply Western Europe with oil in the event that supplies from the Middle East were cut off, and blocking requests by the British government to the International Monetary Fund to make available its deposited dollar funds. So grave was the UK’s monetary predicament that Harold Macmillan, Eden’s chancellor and successor in No 10, told the Cabinet that he could “not any more be responsible for Her Majesty’s exchequer” unless a ceasefire was declared.

On Saturday, Trump posted a deranged and rambling screed on Truth Social – 172 words longer than Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address but rather more demotic in style. “World Peace is at stake!” he said. “China and Russia want Greenland, and there is not a thing that Denmark can do about it. They currently have two dogsleds as protection, one added recently. Only the United States of America, under PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP, can play in this game, and very successfully, at that!”

The European nations who last week sent a few dozen military personnel to Greenland were, he continued, playing a “very dangerous game”, and, as punishment, would face a 10 per cent tariff on all goods entering the US from February 1, rising to 25 per cent on June 1- unless “a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland”.

Then, as now, Israeli government policy under prime minister David Ben-Gurion was globally controversial. Then, as now, an oppressed people rose up against their totalitarian masters. In Hungary, the Soviet Union sent 200,000 troops and 4,000 tanks to suppress the fledgling democracy, at a cost of at least 2,500 lives. Many more Iranians have died at the hands of the Islamofascist regime in Tehran.

As in 1956, the British prime minister is politically weak, a year and a half after a decisive general election victory. Keir Starmer, at least, is in good health. Eden was in a desperate physiological state, doped with opiates and amphetamines, and in chronic pain after a botched gall bladder operation.

So bad was his condition that he and his wife retreated to Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye estate in Jamaica, leaving his de facto deputy Rab Butler and Macmillan to run the shop in his absence. All the same: Starmer, like Eden, suffers grievously from the assumption in the political class, at home and abroad, that he will soon be forced from No 10.

As was clear from his deluded performance in Downing Street on Monday, the PM has yet to confront fully the grim reality that a notional friendship with a maniac will deliver, at best, diminishing returns. He conspicuously failed to address the point made to him by Robert Peston of ITV News: that Trump is not behaving like a man who is amenable to reason or respects the rule of law.

The Suez crisis was a hugely consequential moment in geopolitical history – ending, once and for all, the pretensions of Britain and France as colonial powers and entrenching the role of the US as the lead Western power in maintaining stability in the Middle East.

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