When Donald Trump threatened on Tuesday that “a whole civilisation will die tonight“, he hoped to present himself as the strong leader who is forcing the Iranian regime to surrender.
But to many Americans, and many on this side of the Atlantic, the one civilisation to which this sleazy, thin-skinned braggart poses a mortal threat is his own.
From George Washington onwards, the United States have been upheld by men and women with a sense of honour, and betrayed by hucksters who are ready to strike any low blow.
Trump is one of the most disreputable presidents in the history of the Republic, a weak man pretending to be strong, an ignoramus who insists he knows what he is doing, a blusterer who dominates the media by being cruder than any of his competitors, a coward who insults brave men like John McCain and Volodymyr Zelensky, an idiot who claims to understand strategy but repeatedly exposes himself as a small-town gangster who betrays anyone unwise enough to trust him.
One can see why Sir Keir Starmer finds it hard to know how to deal with Trump. The President is an Anglophile who loves the British monarchy.
Trump was pleased by Starmer’s British accent, and to begin with spoke well of him, which the PM swanked about, as any of us might.
But then Trump started this war, without setting out a clear strategic objective, let alone one that could be justified in international law.
Starmer had his doubts, and so did the friends and fellow lawyers by whose advice he sets such store. The war was not approved by any of the people with whom in the good old days in Camden Town he used to have dinner.
He therefore denied our American allies the use of British airfields.
Trump was not amused. It occurred to Starmer he had better do something to ingratiate himself, so he said our airfields could be used by the Americans for defensive but not offensive operations.
Meanwhile it emerged that the Royal Navy was unable to send a single ship to defend Britain’s sovereign bases in Cyprus, and had just withdrawn its last minesweeper from the Gulf, so could do nothing to defend our allies there, or to uphold freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.
For several months it had become more and more likely that hostilities would break out in the Gulf, and the British Government had done nothing whatever to deploy ships which would be ready to play a role, but had withdrawn the last remnants of the Royal Navy.
Starmer and his colleagues opted out. He now adds insult to injury by boasting of opting out. He tells those few viewers who can bear to listen to a word he says that “this is not our war“.
But like it or not, this is our war. It has a tremendous effect on ourselves, our Gulf allies, and our American allies. Are we to felicitate ourselves, as Starmer does, on opting out?
Are we, as a British statesman put it in 1936, to “go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent“?
The PM’s handlers realise that is not a good look, so he has been dispatched to the Gulf, to be photographed with the handful of our forces which is deployed there, and to show the rulers of the Gulf states that we have not entirely abandoned them.
Out of courtesy, and for old time’s sake, they receive this timid, ineffectual statesman.
But the test for Starmer and his colleagues is whether they resolve that such a humiliation shall never again be visited upon us.
Is it acceptable that Britain should no longer have a Royal Navy which is capable of leaving port? Of course not. We must once more start spending proper money on defence. By starting a war for which we were pitifully unprepared, Trump has at least taught us that lesson.