After Sinn Fein’s win last week, fears were elevated and tempers flared everywhere from Belfast to Brussels. Brexit continues to offer up little more than downsides.

Boris Johnson is backed into a corner. He has to appease the hard-right Brexit fanatics in his own party and is threatening to tear up his own Northern Ireland protocol agreement. The EU has vowed to retaliate if he does.

Joe Biden has made an appeal and asked Johnson to show “courage, cooperation and leadership” to settle what was a simmering dispute, now a full-on diplomatic dispute that could very easily plunge London and Brussels into a trade war.

America is preparing to step in by appointing a special envoy to protect the Good Friday Agreement – and is even threatening to respond to any unilateral UK move by “using legal and political tools” at its disposal.

The European Commission said in a two-page document to its own member states that “renegotiation of the protocol was not an option.”

A red line has been drawn by the European Union and it has America’s backing.

In an interview in Sweden, where Boris Johnson is ‘bigging up’ Britain’s nuclear arsenal in the region, he told BBC News there was no “need for drama” over what he said was a “crazy” dispute over a “very small part of the whole European economy”. Comments like these are typical of a man who has demonstrated very little technical understanding of his own agreement.

From the inside, fears were calmed last month when EU diplomats reportedly said that the EU would be patient in order to avoid boosting Boris Johnson’s popularity with pro-Brexit Conservative MPs.

“We don’t want to become part of a Tory leadership contest,” and the bloc doesn’t want to “make life impossible for a future Tory leader”.

Behind the scenes, EU diplomats were hoping Boris Johnson would finally be ousted after a string of political scandals and the disastrous local elections result – and a more pragmatic relationship could be established with his successor.

That time has now passed and EU diplomats said Brussels was now going to respond to any unilateral UK move by restarting legal action against London for failing to impose full checks on traders in Northern Ireland. These were paused last year to allow negotiations to continue. But the talks have made little progress in that time.

For Britain, the choice is now stark. It is facing the red lines of the EU and America. It either backs down and compromises or enters a trade war. Both options are in the control of fundamentalists on the hard-right within the Tory party.

Simplistically put – the reality is that both options are the result of political failure. The Tories are facing a dilemma of their own making. It’s an embarrassing U-turn on a fundamental issue that Brexit represents or a trade war with our biggest trading partners who are supported by our second biggest trading partners. The likelihood of some middle-ground negotiation has long gone.