In what is likely to be an increasingly feverish climate for Europe in 2019, as the Brits prepare for exit and the US moves into the early stages of a presidential election, the time for reckoning in the European Union has finally arrived.

Fewer than two years in Donald Trump’s term, the extraordinary has become the unremarkable. The window for more significant legislation will definitely be short. But it looks like the rhetoric from Trump against anyone who lifts his head to complain will only get louder.

When world leaders met in Paris some weeks ago for the centenary of the 1918 armistice, Trump looked more comfortable with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Russia’s invincible President Vladimir Putin than with Germany’s Angela Merkel or France’s Emmanuel Macron. Moreover, it is now no secret that Trump’s two solid friends in Europe are the defiantly illiberal Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and the Polish Law and Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

Not so long ago, European leaders were fairly clear about the hierarchy of threats to their continent. Putin was high on any threat list. So too was the present danger of Islamist terrorism and potential spill-over from the conflicts in the Middle East while in the background lay China’s strategic ambitions plus the pressures of migration and the big, big problem of climate change.

The time for serious reckoning by the EU is now on the table.