This is , a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper normally written by Patrick Cockburn. As Patrick is away, former BBC foreign correspondent Nick Bryant pens this newsletter.

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The summer of America’s semiquincentennial, the country’s 250th birthday, will go down as a season of national waning. All those gold trappings in the imperial capital recall the decadence, and decline, of Rome.

Donald Trump’s United States is becoming increasingly friendless. American isolationism is conventionally thought of as an active choice by the United States itself. Now, as the age of America comes to an end, it is being imposed from outside by other countries, including long-standing allies.

This week it was not the US President who was heralded as the leader of the free world, but the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who adopted the tone of a wartime leader in the trade dispute with Washington. “You’re at war when you’re attacked, and we got attacked,” said the former Bank of England governor, channeling his inner Churchill. Carney has dispensed with the deferential default adopted by so many Western leaders towards Trump and again opted for defiance.

His rousing public statements this week have echoed his era-defining speech in Davos earlier this year in which he sounded the death knell of the post-war US-led economic order. “The 80-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership – when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect, and championed the free and open exchange of good and services – is over,” he declared back in January. The leitmotif of his Davos opus was that “middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu”. Now, in the most asymmetrical of fights, he is testing whether his nation with a $2.5trn (£1.84trn) economy can take on a superpower with a $32trn (23.5trn) economy.

As the Canadian-American commentator David Frum pointed out in this week: “Wars are not decided only by the question, ‘who can inflict more pain? Wars are also decided by the question, ‘who can endure more pain?’ What’s more, the pain threshold of an embattled country rises when it faces an existential threat, as Iran has shown in defying the United States and Ukraine in refusing to surrender to Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Trump’s threats to turn the Maple Leaf nation into America’s 51st state, as part of his “Donroe Doctrine” plan for hemispheric domination, explains much of the “elbows up” feistiness of Canada’s normally mild-mannered citizens. Polling suggests three-quarters support Carney’s decision to withdraw from the trade talks, even though 40 per cent fear for their jobs.

A protracted dollar-for-dollar trade war would be more economically ruinous north of the border than south. But Canada has a significant economic arsenal. As Carney reminded his compatriots, it supplies 85 per cent of electricity imports, and 60 per cent of crude oil imports. It is also the largest customer for 26 US states, and a top three customer for 45. Trump, as well as threatening the destruction of the Canadian auto industry, has renamed Lake Ontario Lake America. Typically sophomoric, its the sort of stunt that again diminishes his office and his country.

The fight has parallels with the US war with Iran, where a country of roughly 92 million people has so far resisted one of 342 million because of its readiness to withstand more military pain than Trump is prepared to withstand political and economic pain. The launch this week of Operation Economic Outcast, a new sanctions regime which US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent likened to an “economic D-Day”, was an admission that Trump’s military strategy has failed.

The aim is to strangulate an already ailing Iranian economy by applying secondary sanctions to its trading partners, including state-owned companies in China, India and Europe – “to sever every remaining economic lifeline sustaining” Iran, as Bessent put it. But it’s doubtful whether Trump is truly willing to take on Iran’s biggest trading partner, China, which purchases 80 per cent of its oil. That would risk the delicate trade détente with Beijing ahead of the summit between Trump and Xi Jinping scheduled for late September, the first state visit to Washington by the Chinese president since 2015.

Last year, Trump hurriedly backed down when Xi threatened to limit the export of Chinese critical rare earths and magnets. Given their one-year trade truce expires in October, Trump most likely will not want to risk Chinese counter-measures on the eve of congressional midterm elections. Tellingly, at the news conference announcing new sanctions, Bessent did not once utter the word “China”.

What was also striking was that Bessent acted unilaterally. When Barack Obama concluded the nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, he stood at the head of a diplomatic push which included the UK, France, Germany, the European Union, Russia and China.

Throughout the summer months signs of America’s waning have abounded. Now that the aircraft carrier the USS has replaced the beleaguered USS in the Gulf, the United States does not have a carrier attack group in the Indo-Pacific. The Pentagon had to cancel a joint amphibious landing exercise with South Korea because of force availability constraints caused by the conflict with Iran. CNN reported last month that the US has exhausted 80 per cent of its Thaad missile inventory. This week retired four-star US army general Barry McCaffrey created headlines by pointing out that the vulnerability of US bases to Iranian missile and drone strikes could lead to the permanent loss of 15 such facilities in the Gulf. Israel’s often submissive Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also rejected Trump’s 15-point peace plan for Gaza.

This week, Andy Burnham chaired a meeting of the “coalition of the willing” in Kyiv, a body instigated by Britain and France to defend Ukraine which does not even include the United States.

Britain is still desperate to maintain a special relationship with Washington that often feels like a servile relationship. Burnham was chummy in his first telephone call with Trump and delighted the President by signalling new oil and gas production in the North Sea. But Britain is also busy diversifying diplomatically by resetting its relationship with Beijing. Sir Keir Starmer’s visit to China in January – the first by a UK prime minister in almost eight years – was intended to thaw what he characterised as a diplomatic “ice age”. In the first half of this year, Beijing hosted foreign leaders and senior officials from 23 countries, including Canada, France, Ireland, Finland, Spain and Germany.

To say that “America First” means America alone has become a cliché. More and more, it doubles as a truism. Why, Trump is even thinking of rekindling his first term bromance with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. A summit between the two would highlight Trump’s isolation: “Little Rocket man” and an incredibly shrinking US president.

Bryant’s pick

No TV show makes me laugh out loud more at the moment than Colin from Accounts, a romcom starring the real-life husband-and-wife team of Harriet Dyer and Patrick Brammall. It is set in Sydney, my adopted home, but there is not a beach, kangaroo or koala anywhere to be seen. Filmed in a landlocked, hipster suburb of Sydney, it is the antithesis of Home and Away, where Australia always looks like the lifestyle superpower of the world. The only animal is a crippled dog, Colin from Accounts.