The Chinese response to the latest North Korea missile launch is not to threaten North Korea but to warn the US against military action whilst ruling out across-the-board sanctions and regime change.  Moreover China – contrary to its previous practice and its probable wishes – has been driven to state this clearly and in public, and has enlisted Russia’s support.

Kim Jong-un will no doubt go through the motions of rejecting China’s proposal.  He can do so in the confident knowledge that there will be no penalty since the US will reject it also.  In the meantime he has pocketed assurances from China and Russia that they will not impose across-the-board economic sanctions on his country. Privately he must be delighted with the way things are turning out.

The only other time indicators were at this level was before the dot com crash at the turn of the millennium. Experts are now worried that history is about to repeat itself. It comes after stock markets in both the US and Britain have continually topped their highest ever levels in recent months.

American's top stock indices the Dow Jones and S&P 500 are up a staggering 20 per cent and 16 per cent respectively over the past 12 months, while Britain's FTSE 100 has surged as much as 15 per cent over the past 12 months.

If companies are in good health and profits are growing, soaring share prices may be justified. But one method of assessing share values, the Shiller PE (Price to Earnings) ratio on average inflation-adjusted earnings from the previous 10 years, suggests that stocks are very expensive… this level is at its highest since the Dot Com bubble burst in 2000 and stock markets crashed.

Summoning over 900 politicians from both houses of the French parliament to a rare Congress at the palace of Louis XIV – the ‘Sun King’ – in Versailles, he threatened to overrule lawmakers with a referendum if they try to frustrate the “reforms” he wishes to impose on the legislature. Such assemblies are usually reserved for times of national crisis.

Reuters reports him as saying he desires to reign as a “Jupiterian” president – “a remote, dignified figure, like the Roman god of gods, who weighs his rare pronouncements carefully”.

This bizarre statement of intent comes just days after Macron scrapped the president’s traditional Bastille Day press conference, with an Elysée Palace official claiming the 39-year-old’s thoughts are “too complex” for journalists. Macron’s “complex thought process lends itself badly to the game of question-and-answer with journalists”, the spokesman explained – prompting much mockery in the French press.

Later this month, Mr Trump will also make a presidential visit to France. The Polish government is trying to become less energy-dependent on Russia and last month the first ever US liquefied natural gas shipment arrived.

For dealmaker Donald Trump, this is another win-win. Poland and other eastern European countries have a strategic imperative to diversify their energy sources, and the White House wants to sell more US gas overseas. He will be bringing that message to leaders at the Three Seas Summit.

In Federalist No. 2, John Jay writes of them as “one united people … descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs. …” If such are the elements of nationhood and peoplehood, can we still speak of Americans as one nation and one people?

We no longer have the same ancestors. They are of every color and from every country. We do not speak one language, but rather English, Spanish and a host of others. We long ago ceased to profess the same religion. We are evangelical Christians, mainstream Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, agnostics and atheists. Federalist No. 2 celebrated our unity. Today’s elites proclaim that our diversity is our strength. But is this true, or a tenet of trendy ideology?

After the attempted massacre of Republican congressmen at that ball field in Alexandria, Fareed Zakaria wrote: “The political polarization that is ripping this country apart” is about “identity … gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation (and) social class.” He might have added – religion, morality, culture and history.

Zakaria seems to be tracing the disintegration of our society to that very diversity that its elites proclaim to be its greatest attribute: “If the core issues are about identity, culture and religion … then compromise seems immoral. American politics is becoming more like Middle Eastern politics, where there is no middle ground between being Sunni or Shiite.”

The two industrial powerhouses of Asia and Europe are being nudged into an informal alliance to pick up the leadership baton that the US is accused of having dropped since President Donald Trump’s inauguration earlier this year, according to diplomats and officials from several Group of 20 members.

The situation has crystallized ahead of this year’s annual G-20 meeting, which will be held in Germany’s busiest commercial port. That’s in part because, for the first time since the group’s founding, the US will be represented by a president who embraces protectionism, abandoning decades of American cheer-leading for free trade.

“You are all slaves. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to express an honest opinion. If you expressed it, you would know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid $150 for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things.

If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, I would be like Othello before twenty-four hours: my occupation would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to villify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for what is about the same — his salary.

You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an “Independent Press”! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”

In a joint statement, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel and Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern stressed that, “Europe’s energy supply is a matter for Europe, not the United States of America”; “instruments for political sanctions should not be tied to economic interests”; and the whole thing heralds a “new and very negative quality in European-American relations”.

An oil trader in the Gulf bluntly told me, “the new sanctions against Russia basically amount to telling the EU to buy expensive US gas instead of cheap Russian gas. So the Germans and the Austrians basically told the Americans to buzz off.”

A top US intel source, Middle East-based and a dissident to the Beltway consensus, stresses how, “the United States Senate by a nearly unanimous vote have decided to declare war on Russia (sanctions are war) and Germany has threatened retaliation against the United States if it initiates sanctions.”