The West acts tough with Russia because we’re just too feeble to stand up to our real enemy … China

So they finally got their war. But what are they going to do now? This is the most avoidable, needless conflict in modern history.

It was nurtured and hatched in the small minds of foolish men. There was a compromise available, but because they were too proud to consider it, terrified civilians now weep outside the ruins of what were once their homes.

At this point, these noisy boasters turn out, as usual, to have big mouths and tiny fists. The Kremlin, responding to years of deliberate humiliation, taunting and provocation, finally goes mad and invades a sovereign country. The mighty West hits back by… chucking Moscow out of the Eurovision Song Contest.

You might have thought that, after 30 years of tough talk, they could have come up with something a bit better than that. But if you had observed, as I have, the steady, shameful shrivelling of Britain’s diplomatic soft power and hard armed forces over the past three decades, you would not have been surprised.

When I say ‘they’, I mean the army of Washington power-worshippers, think-tankers, politicians and swaggering musclemen journalists – most of whom have never heard a bullet fly or seen a corpse.

Since 1992, they have thought it wise to treat Russia like a beaten dog. The inventor of that policy is the American neo-conservative politician Paul Wolfowitz. He just happens to be the architect of that other great disaster, the Iraq War.

The New York Times in March 1992 reported the existence of a Pentagon document, believed to be the work of Mr Wolfowitz. It said that from now on there should only be one superpower. It stated ‘Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.’

The suggestion was ridiculous. The former Soviet Union was at that time a bankrupt mass of scrap metal, rust and corruption. I was there, I know. Once the dust settled, it would find itself with an economy the size of Italy’s, and an ageing, ill, diminishing population. The Communist ideology which had driven its expansion and aggression was dead.