Tariffs are wrong. The US should continue its role as security guarantor of the free world. Truth is objective and not relative or “constructed”.

That is a far from exhaustive list of the epiphanies that some progressives waited until the Donald Trump years to have. The former US president’s underrated gift to politics was, at least on some issues, a better, harder-headed left.

Saudi Arabia wasn’t one of them. Here, the itch to oppose Trump, who courted the kingdom, boxed the left into a position of impractical righteousness. Joe Biden called it a “pariah state” for killing a Virginia-resident journalist and dissident. He has snubbed the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who could plausibly govern his country for the next half-century. Eighteen months into his administration, America has no permanent ambassador in Riyadh.