“Do morals matter?” feels like a particularly apposite question to ask about American presidents during the Trump era. There has rarely been an occupant of the White House who makes less effort to cloak his actions in the language of morality.

The actions and rhetoric of Donald Trump are inevitably changing the perception of the US around the world. They are also forcing American analysts to grapple with difficult questions about the moral purpose of US foreign policy — an issue that Michael Kimmage, Joseph Nye and Barry Gewen all tackle from different angles, in their new books.

In The Abandonment of the West, Kimmage, a diplomat turned professor, argues that the west as a whole has lost confidence in its own morality, and in the values of the Enlightenment. In that sense, Trump is a logical consequence of a long-term trend. As Kimmage sees it, “In his indifference to liberty and contempt for self-government, at home and abroad, Donald Trump is the first non-Western president of the United States.”