[scoundrel]

Trump's relationship with Britain and PM Theresa May?
I have a feeling this will be another GWB/Tony Blair type thing, in which we British will get an awful lot of "Yo! Blair!" Donald Trump has got very bad manners and Mrs May will be obliged to grit her teeth and be patient. I hope at least that he knows how to use a knife and fork.

Against that, Mr Trump no doubt has things he wants and he believes in the "deal" as a concept, so (going by his track record) he will begin by seeking to find out what it is that Mrs May wants. Then he will calculate values and when he feels ready he will propose a deal. Britain and America have been trading favours like the mafia for over 100 years now; this will continue. It will continue more easily because the British were quick to accept the verdict of the US voters when others were too slow and too eager to give public vent to their wounded feelings.

Mr Trump's relationship with Angela Merkel?
She has been one of the others who were much too slow to accept the new reality. Holding a pre-summit meeting of EU foreign ministers to have crisis talks about how to educate Mr Trump about Europe was not a clever move on the part of the EU and Frau Merkel was unwise to allow her foreign minister to attend and participate. She should have explicitly ordered him not to go.

Now she is in a bit of a bind strategically. The EU is pursuing a sanctions policy against Russia over Ukraine. I think Mr Trump will be against this sanctions policy and will take Mr Putin's side. His take is likely to be that, without paying for the necessary military force themselves, Germany has tried to use NATO as a shield behind which to expand the German economic sphere eastwards. To put it crudely, in this version Ukraine is a bone and two dogs have fallen out over it; but the bone has historically belonged to the Russian dog and the German/EU dog was trying to steal it. Mr Trump will hand the bone to the Russian dog and beat the German/EU dog for trespassing. Frau Merkel was working with a very different US administration and that's all gone; now she needs to trim her sails.

Mr Trump and Mr Putin?
Vladimir Putin is the nearest thing to Count Blofelt that I have ever seen. There are a lot of opportunities opening for him now and he will calculate well in the short run, I do not doubt. But he could easily over-reach and get greedy and what Mr Putin should bear in mind is that Mr Trump has a really evil temper and is emotional, malicious and revengeful, not a calculator.