It is dangerous to assume the past is superior to the present. After going back through all the crises since the end of the Second World War, however, I cannot find a time when Britain was so out of options and so out of luck. By “options”, I don’t mean escape routes liberal readers of the Observer would welcome, just alternatives that seemed plausible at the time.

Suez? Get the troops out of Egypt. Union militancy? Thatcher. The degradation of the public realm? New Labour. The crash of 2008? Austerity. There was always an escape, however unpalatable. Now, to steal William Hague’s description of the eurozone crisis, Brexit Britain is a burning building with no exits. The alarms ring but no rescuers come.

If you try to understand as well as condemn the architects of Brexit, you see at once that their hopes are in pieces. The strategic basis for Brexit was that Britain would cut its ties with its European allies and set out across the oceans to create a new alliance with America. They believed that some as yet undiscovered hereditary principle guaranteed that the Anglosphere – the white Commonwealth plus America – promoted free trade and prosperity.

In vain did their opponents argue that our trade with the EU vastly exceeded our trade with the US and that a strong America would turn on a weak Britain and force it to accept chlorinated chicken and the privatisation of NHS services. Tories of all people were meant to know that life wasn’t fair, we said. The classically educated among them ought to have learned Thucydides’s warning that in international affairs, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”. Trump was an America First protectionist who no more believed in free trade than he supported the #MeToo movement.

We have been vindicated on every point. The Trump visit ought to be a moment of national awakening. Instead, it has been a national humiliation. A government and an opposition with an ounce of self-respect would have responded to Trump’s ultimatum that he would not allow a trade deal unless we delivered the Brexit he wanted by reassessing our decision to leave the EU. A Conservative party that still respected itself and the country would have revolted at the impertinence of the leader of an increasingly hostile foreign power telling them to see Boris Johnson as “a great prime minister”.

Instead, Theresa May’s government allowed the special relationship to become an abusive relationship. Like a battered wife lying to the police, it pretended that Trump had not insulted May and that a trade deal would go ahead and then waited for a pathological liar to lie that he had never said what he had said, on the record and on tape.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Former foreign secretary Boris Johnson in London on 11 July. Donald trump said he would make ‘a great prime minister’. Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

A second defeat is worth noting. To its proponents, Brexit was never meant to threaten Britain’s security. By last week, it was clear that Trump’s America, on which the Tory right has gambled our futures, is a clear and present danger to Nato. With a wonderful serendipity, as Trump was meeting the Queen, the US Department of Justice indicted 12 alleged Russian spies for helping Trump to power. We already know that Russia wanted Trump because he was against Nato and because, in all his foul harangues, has never once uttered a bad word about Putin.

At the parochial level, the Tories ought to be terrified. They want to attack Jeremy Corbyn for being against Nato and in favour of anti-western dictatorial regimes. But Brexit is tying the Tories in general and Johnson and the Tory right in particular to a US president who is against Nato and in favour of anti-western dictatorial regimes.

Step back from local politics and the global picture looks worse. “The west” is based on the American military guarantee to Nato. If Trump and Putin weaken or abolish it, the west would have to be rebuilt, assuming that it survives at all. A confident government would look around and suspend or cancel Brexit, because this was not the time to tear up Britain’s alliances with Paris and Berlin.

Politicians across parliament know it but dare not say it. The referendum result prevents them from speaking out, as it prevents them from even having a Mueller-style inquiry into Russian interference in our referendum. You could almost burst out laughing.Brexit was meant to have been about taking back control; instead, it has produced a country in the grip of an uncontrollable neurosis.

All the symptoms are there. No one – not Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson, Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn – can tell the public the truth that we either stay so closely aligned to the EU that there is no point in leaving or we suffer a shuddering economic shock and a catastrophic fall in our global standing .

Like the First World War generals who thought their men could pierce impregnable defences, if only they threw themselves at them with enough elan, the Tory right pretends we could have our cake and eat it if only we spoke louder. Trump would know how to deal with the EU, an admiring Johnson cried: “He’d go in bloody hard.” The bloody hard strategy is calling the EU’s bluff by preparing for a no-deal Brexit. As the EU knows, no deal would cause chaos; the threat has all the conviction of a man pulling a gun in a bank and shouting: “Give me the money or I’ll shoot myself in the heart.”

Last, but not least, is the paralysis that accompanies advanced neurosis. Quite possibly, there is no majority in parliament not just for no deal or May’s deal (whatever that is) but for any deal and we will slip into chaos for want of an alternative.

The rightwing press accuses supporters of the EU of thinking the 17.4 million who voted Leave are stupid. I don’t, but I do think the 2016 referendum was stupid – cretinously so to the point of idiocy. With unforgivable cynicism, Vote Leave refused to explain what Brexit would entail for fear of weakening its cause. Unlike the Irish government before the abortion referendum, the Cameron government did not spell out what Brexit would mean. We’re working out the meaning of Brexit after rather than before the referendum.

I still believe in the common sense of most (if not all) of my fellow citizens. Their tragedy is that by the time understanding dawns they will find that they have voted to lock themselves in a burning building and to throw away the key.

• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist