Brexit Britain and Trump’s America are linked in their desire to pull down the pillars of Pax Americana and European unification. In a perverse way, this may herald a revival of a “special relationship” between Britain and the United States, a case of history repeating itself not exactly as farce but as tragi-farce. Trump told Theresa May that he would like to have the same relationship with her that Ronald Reagan had with Margaret Thatcher. But the first British politician to arrive at Trump Tower to congratulate the president-elect was not the prime minister or even the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, but Nigel Farage.

Trump and Farage, beaming like schoolboys in front of Trump’s gilded elevator, gloated over their victories by repeating the same word that once made their respective countries exceptional: “freedom.” In the privacy of Trump’s home, Farage suggested that the new president should move Winston Churchill’s bust back into the Oval Office. Trump thought this a splendid idea.

A month before Trump’s election and three months after the Brexit vote, I visited the great military historian Sir Michael Howard at his home in rural England. As a young man, Howard fought the Germans as an officer in the British Army. He landed in Italy in 1943 and took part in the decisive battle of Salerno, for which he was awarded the Military Cross. John Wayne and Kenneth More were a fantasy. Sir Michael was the real thing. He is 95 years old.

After lunch at a local pub, just a few miles from where my grandparents used to live, we talked about Brexit, the war, American politics, Europe and our families. The setting could not have been more English, with the pale autumn sun setting over the rolling hills of Berkshire. Like my great-grandparents, Sir Michael’s maternal grandparents were German Jews who moved to England, where they did very well. Like mine, his family of immigrants became utterly British. In addition to being Regius professor of history at Oxford University, Howard taught at Yale. He knows America well and has no illusions about the “special relationship,” which he believes was invented by Churchill and was always much overblown.

Sitting in his drawing room, with books piled up around us, many of them about World War II, I wanted to hear his thoughts on Brexit. He replied in a tone of resigned melancholy more than outrage. Brexit, he said, “is accelerating the disintegration of the Western world.” Contemplating that world, so carefully constructed after the war he fought in, he said: “Perhaps it was just a bubble in an ocean.” I asked him about the special Anglo-American relationship. “Ah, ‘the special relationship,’ ” he said. “It was a necessary myth, a bit like Christianity. But now where do we go?”

Where indeed? The last hope of the West might be Germany, the country that Michael Howard fought against and that I hated as a child. Angela Merkel’s message to Trump on the day after his victory was a perfect expression of Western values that are still worth defending. She would welcome a close cooperation with the United States, she said, but only on the basis of “democracy, freedom and respect for the law and the dignity of man, independent of origin, skin color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views.” Merkel spoke as the true heiress of the Atlantic Charter.

Germany, too, once thought it was the exceptional nation. This ended in a worldwide catastrophe. The Germans learned their lesson. They no longer wanted to be exceptional in any way, which is why they were so keen to be embedded in a unified Europe. The last thing Germans wanted was to lead other countries, especially in any military sense. This is the way Germany’s neighbors wished it as well. Pax Americana seemed vastly preferable to a revival of German exceptionalism. I still think so. But looking once more at that photograph of the Donald and Farage, baring their teeth in glee, thumbs held high, with the gold from the elevator door glinting in their hair, I wonder whether Germany might not be compelled to question a lesson it learned a little too well.