Editorial: ​The United Kingdom is right to stay close to the United States while standing up to Russia

​President Trump will land in Britain today ahead of his state visit to the UK.

​American commanders-in-chief have been honoured guests in this country since the first of them made a presidential visit, Woodrow Wilson after the Great War in 1918 (more than 130 years after the US was founded).

But relations between Britain and America have entered perhaps their strangest phase in more than a century.

President Trump, while an anglophile of Scottish-German ancestry, is one of the most isolationist US leaders. He is more in tune with that strain of America First thinking personified in the 1930s by the hero pilot Charles Lindberg, who was also of German origin.

Britain is right to try to stay close to what is still the world’s only superpower (but will one day soon no longer have such lone status), given the unique shared history between us. But even the most pro Trump elements of the British political right ought to be concerned at President Trump’s turn away from US international commitments.

The UK is rightly deploying RAF jets to Poland in response to Russian drones violating the country’s airspace. Sir Keir Starmer said Britain would provide “further air defence over Poland” after multiple Russian drones were shot down by Nato forces.

Nato is a vital western defence institution, but an imperilled one, given this new mood of US isolationism.

President Trump’s shock approach to policy has paid dividends in getting first world democracies to take seriously mass immigration, and they way it threatens western values, and defence, which Europe thought it could ignore. But he has sent out a disturbing message of ambivalence about Russian aggression in Ukraine.

The UK can stay close to the US but make clear that the defence of western Europe is one of our highest priorities even if it is no longer an American one.