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In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, one sees moral indignation bursting out of newspaper pages and social media posts.

One is also regaled with obscene gloating and shrieks of joy, but let’s disregard those for the time being. Let’s just concentrate on what the good people are saying.

Let’s also agree with them: the hideous creature who committed that crime should follow his victim to the celestial crossroads, where their paths will diverge. Kirk will go up to join the angels, whereas his murderer will be evenly browned on all sides by the fires of hell.

However, inductive thinking takes some commentators from this particular crime to a general, absolutist statement: any assassination is wrong. Is it though? This is a genuine question, not an expression of doubt.

Imagine for the sake of argument that some far-sighted, trigger-happy chap killed both Lenin and Trotsky in September, 1917. It’s plausible that a Bolshevik coup wouldn’t have happened the next month: those two energumens were the principal engines of that evil event.

We are none of us determinists, are we? We don’t think that, if things happen, they were bound to happen. So yes, what Lenin called a revolutionary situation did exist in Russia. But with him and the other ghoul gone, it’s possible that situation would have fizzled out.

I’ll spare you a list of tragedies that would have been prevented, the exact count of the millions of lives that would have been saved, wars that would have been averted. So is assassination really wrong? Any assassination?

Or look at what happened in Munich on 9 November, 1923. During the Beer Hall Putsch, the police killed 15 rampaging Nazis. Hitler, along with Göring, Hess and Rosenberg, was in the front row of the marchers, but he survived.

What if he hadn’t? Again, it’s conceivable that the Nazis wouldn’t have risen to power, which would have spared the world untold miseries. That’s another blow delivered to the conviction that all assassinations are wrong. That absolute turns out to be interlaced with relativism.

Suddenly we are entering the area of what used to be called ‘Hottentot morality’, a term that was coined in the 17^th century with deplorable disregard for the future placing of racism at the top of the deadly sins. The concept is usually encapsulated in the phrase: “If he steals my cow, that’s bad. If I steal his cow, that’s good.”

Once we find ourselves in this territory, God only knows where we’ll end up. For example, Boris Johnson was, and Sadiq Khan is, the mayor of London. Would you have been equally outraged had both of them found themselves on the receiving end of an assassin’s bullet?

Yes, I know, you’d be outraged in both cases. But equally? Don’t lie to me, your mother taught you to tell the truth. Admit your response would be at least partly tinged with your feelings about those gentlemen – I know mine would be.

Moving on, pacifists insist that any war is evil, and fair enough: most wars are. However, some wars, evil though they may be, prevent a greater evil. In that case they are just, and Augustine settled that point 1,600-odd years ago.

Relativism again breaks into the beautiful edifice of a priori certainty, forcing us to make a judgement, something today’s ethos insists we shouldn’t do. ‘Judgemental’ and ‘opinionated’ are among the worst things to be, almost as bad as ‘racist’ and ‘transphobe’.

Yet the very people who use those words that way express opinions every day and pass judgement every minute. Theirs, however, come down from a high moral ground, which spares them the branding iron of ‘judgemental’ and ‘opinionated’. It’s that relativism again, following us everywhere we go.

Even such beautiful concepts as freedom stop working if unqualified. There the English language offers an essential nuance absent in many other languages, such as French.

We distinguish between freedom and liberty, with the former being more inward, spiritual and the latter more outward, political. Freedom is more or less God-given; liberty is more or less a matter of consent.

But absolutes don’t apply to either: Penelope’s freedom to play the piano at home may interfere with our neighbours’ freedom to have a nap whenever they feel like one. People’s freedom to gridlock Westminster to register a lawful protest impinges on my freedom to drive to Covent Garden. Everyone’s democratic liberty to vote may destroy the country by giving it Keir Starmer.

An equitable accommodation, which is to say compromise, must be found in each case. But it takes subjective judgement to decide what is or isn’t equitable, so there goes another absolute, relativised right out of the window.

How do we make judgements, especially moral ones? What if my idea of morality is different from yours, yours from theirs, and theirs from anything known this side of hell?

How do we decide? More important, how do we throw all those private moralities into a cauldron, boil them together and produce a homogeneous and reasonably palatable mix called civilised society?

I know only one answer to this question, although I’m happy to entertain any others. All those relativist judgements must be traceable back to something immutable and unmovable. RG Collingwood called it the ‘absolute presupposition’, I have referred to it as the ‘metaphysical premise’, but we both meant the same thing: religious faith.

If we each practise our little relativities and at the same time judge their morality, that’s like the same man acting as both player and referee in a football match. If rules don’t come down from a single moral authority superior to us, it’s children’s time and there are no rules. Read Lord of the Flies to see what happens next.

Our judgements are all at least latently comparative. When rating the morality of a person, we judge him against a certain unquestionable standard and find him either wanting or in agreement. That doesn’t mean we’ll all reach the same conclusion; we may not.

But at least we’ll have a subject for sensible discussion. We may argue, but only about interpretation, not the criteria.

At the end of the argument, we may agree or disagree. In either case, we may remain friendly enough to have a drink together (mine is whisky, in case you’re wondering). More to the point, we’ll be able to squeeze our individualities into the framework of a corporate entity called society.

If, however, we have no such absolute authority, we’ll have not freedom but license, not liberty but anarchy, not society but an aggregate of atomised individuals illustrating Hobbes’s idea about war of all against all (bellum omnium contra omnes).

That may not happen instantly or even quickly. But if our relativities aren’t all originally built on the foundation of something all or most of us accept as absolute truth, it will happen eventually. That’s how civilisations end, and it’s arrogant in the extreme to think that ours is any different.

Over the past few days 30,000 Russian and Belarusian soldiers have conducted the Zapad exercise, figuring out how best to expand Russian colonial aggression.

By way of the warm-up, 23 Russian drones violated Poland’s airspace on 9 September, obviously to test the state of NATO air defences.

That state turned out to be rather worrying: the combined efforts of Polish, Italian, Dutch and German contingents managed to shoot down only four invaders. By comparison, the Ukrainians tend to destroy up to 90 per cent of Russian drones.

That performance must have encouraged the commanders of the Zapad exercise to put even more effort into preparing to recreate the Soviet empire. Missile launches, simulated airstrikes, logistics fine-tuning have all been honed to maximum sharpness.

But, as Messrs Stalin and Hitler demonstrated in the 1940s, it’s not enough to have efficient soldiers, planes and tanks. Success in war may well depend not only on martial efforts but also on diplomatic ones.

Hitler found it out the hard way, by forming his Pact of Steel with Mussolini’s Italy first and then turning it into the Axis by adding Japan. Yet on balance those allies did more harm than good for the Nazi war effort.

The Italian army constantly needed help from German troops that could otherwise have been deployed on the eastern front. The German Supreme Commander in Italy, Field Marshal Kesselring, often complained that it took one German division to keep one Italian division in the fight, which rather negated the overall purpose.

Moreover, not being an industrial power, Italy could produce little in the way of armaments other than state-of-the-art warships. However, after the first clash with the greatly outnumbered Royal Navy in the Mediterranean, those wonderful ships still afloat stayed bottled up in their harbours for the duration of the war.

Meanwhile, Hitler was begging his other major ally, Japan, to strike at Russia from the east just as he was attacking her from the west. Had Japan done so, the Soviet Union would have probably collapsed before 1941 was out.

But, deaf to those entreaties, Japan chose to strike against the US instead. That enabled the Soviets to throw their fresh and now superfluous Far Eastern divisions into the Battle of Moscow, which stopped the German advance and enabled Stalin eventually to win the war.

The other effect of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was enabling FDR to take the US into the war, against the wishes of most Americans and a sizeable congressional pressure. Hitler must have been muttering the German equivalent of “with allies like Italy and Japan, who needs enemies?”.

Stalin, on the other hand, had the US and Britain as allies, and what a difference. Not only was Hitler forced to fight a two-front conflict, but British Arctic convoys and American Pacific ones also carried supplies to Russia, without which Stalin admitted he would have lost the war.

The US in particular supplied over $11 billion worth of goods (some $150 billion in today’s money), including 400,000 vehicles, 14,000 aircraft, 13,000 tanks and mountains of food, fuel, explosives, metals and other raw materials.

This time Russia and the West aren’t allies but enemies, which the former realises more keenly than the latter. As a result, while Trump continues to alienate America’s current or potential friends, Putin is doing his level KGB best to secure useful alliances for Russia in her war on the West.

He can count in his camp both China and India, together amounting to 36 per cent of the world’s population. China is a separate case, what with her harbouring global ambitions of her own. But India could have swung either way before Trump announced a 50 per cent tariff on Indian goods.

He also hosted the head of the Pakistani army at the White House, boasting that he had personally ended a four-day conflict between India and Pakistan in May. Thereby Trump reinforced, mainly in his own eyes, his claim to being a peacemaker worthy of divine blessing and, more to the point, the Nobel Peace Prize.

In the past few weeks Trump also claimed to have singlehandedly ended the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the first time on a radio show in late August: “And I said, ‘I’m not going to do a trade deal if you guys are going to fight – it’s crazy. Anyway, one thing led to another, and I got that one settled.”

Unfortunately, he said ‘Aberb-aijan’ instead of Azerbaijan and ‘Albania’ instead of Armenia. That confused stenographers no end as they assumed the president spoke of some mysterious ‘Arabaijan’. As for Albania, another Muslim country, as far as they knew she wasn’t at war with either Arabaijan or anyone else.

That slip of the tongue was put down to Trump’s venerable age, which probably was true. However, a fortnight later he confused Armenia with Albania a second time, again claiming credit for bringing peace to two countries whose names he either didn’t know or couldn’t pronounce.

Focusing on the president’s deeds rather than words, one has to admit with some chagrin that they are just about as incoherent. He has successfully pushed India into an alliance with China and hence Russia at a time when India was beginning to edge closer to the West.

In late August, the Indian prime minister Modi engaged in public foreplay with Xi and Putin at the summit of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation. That was the first time in seven years that Indian leaders had agreed to meet with their Chinese counterparts.

Then the Indian government issued a press release, saying it wanted to “further strengthen defence co-operation and foster camaraderie between India and Russia, thereby reinforcing the spirit of collaboration and mutual trust”.

In that collaborative and trustful spirit, 65 Indian officers from elite regiments took part in the Zapad exercise demonstrably aimed against the West (which is what the Russian word zapad means). The number may be symbolic but symbols matter, not by themselves but by what they, well, symbolise.

In this case, they symbolise a singular failure of Trump’s foreign policy to secure strong alliances for America and NATO in the likely future war with Russia. Russia, on the other hand, seems to be doing better in that department. If China and India throw their bulk behind Putin’s aggression in Europe, that juggernaut will be so much harder to stop.

All in all, the world would be more secure if Trump got his coveted Nobel Peace Prize, possibly augmented with the Vatican accolade of canonisation, and then withdrew himself from peace-making efforts. They are making a Third World War more, rather than less, likely.

The other day Trump saw an open goal and hit it.

When European NATO members demanded yet again that the US impose new sanctions on Russia, he said he’d do so – provided NATO members stopped buying Russian hydrocarbons.

Now, only those who won’t see fail to notice that Trump hates to upset his friend Vlad. And nothing would upset Putin more than the kind of sanctions that don’t so much hurt his economy as destroy it.

That’s why Trump plays his final-warning game so crudely and ludicrously. He keeps telling Putin that he’d visit apocalyptic plagues on Russia unless Putin starts peace negotiations within a certain period, usually a fortnight.

When that term expires, Trump repeats the same mantra word for word: unless… peace… two weeks. And if the current two-week deadline isn’t honoured, why, Putin had better brace himself for another final warning.

Each time Trump finds a pretext not to act on his threats. But for once NATO’s shameful boost to Russia’s war economy gives him a legitimate excuse.

Of all NATO members, Turkey is the biggest culprit. Last month alone, Turkey spent almost €3 billion on Russian hydrocarbons, making her the third biggest buyer after China and India.

The EU, mainly Putin-friendly Hungary and Slovakia, buy Russian oil to the tune of €22 billion a year, while France, Belgium, Spain and Holland import Russian liquefied natural gas.

This makes NATO’s demands on America hypocritical to the point of being cynical, which Trump was only too happy to point out in his idiosyncratic style:

“I am ready to do major Sanctions on Russia when all NATO Nations have agreed, and started, to do the same thing, and when all NATO Nations STOP BUYING OIL FROM RUSSIA.

“As you know, NATO’S commitment to WIN has been far less than 100 per cent, and the purchase of Russian Oil, by some, has been shocking! It greatly weakens your negotiating position, and bargaining power, over Russia. Anyway, I am ready to ‘go’ when you are.”

That was calling NATO’s bluff, but then Trump went on to prove he needs no lessons in hypocrisy and cynicism from his European allies. He issued a counter-demand that Europe impose crippling tariffs on China, the biggest importer of Russian oil.

However, while slapping ridiculously high tariffs on countries like Switzerland and Brazil, Trump himself has refrained from imposing extra tariffs on China. His reasons are the same as Europe’s are for buying  Russian oil: the American economy is in hock to cheap Chinese imports.

Yet Trump’s statement is worth looking at in some detail. This is what he wrote: “China has a strong control, and even grip, over Russia, and these powerful Tariffs will break that grip. This is not TRUMP’S WAR (it would never have started if I was President!), it is Biden’s and Zelensky’s WAR.”

The second part is staggering in its fatuousness: “it is Biden’s and Zelensky’s WAR”. Not Putin’s by any chance? Perish the thought. Trump happily exculpates his friend Vlad, thereby validating the Kremlin canard that it was the West that attacked Russia using the Ukraine as a proxy.

But the first part is interesting, for there Trump repeats the claims regularly made by émigré Russian experts. They wonder why, given the West’s craven response to Russian aggression, Putin has so far refrained from using tactical nuclear weapons.

The risk of escalation into a full-scale nuclear exchange with NATO would be minimal, they argue, and I agree. If NATO refuses to supply long-range missiles to the Ukraine, one can’t realistically hope it’ll opt for a cataclysmic response to yet another Russian atrocity.

The same experts conclude that Putin keeps his nukes in his trousers specifically because China ordered him to do so.

There is little doubt, of course, as to who is the senior partner in the Russia-China alliance. Russia has inexorably and willingly been turning herself into Xi’s vassal. But vassalage isn’t slavery.

It’s possible that Xi can tell Putin how far he can or can’t go in his war effort, but I for one tend to take any news coming from Russian sources with a grain of salt, a wedge of lime and a shot of tequila.

It’s in that spirit that I look at the news broken the other day by Putin’s loyal newspaper, Rossiyskaya Gazeta. It quoted Putin as saying:

“The acute period of war conflict with the West in the fields of the Ukraine is entering its final stage. Having decided not to use the most terrifying weapons, trying to save the lives of our brave warriors and civilian population, Russia seems unlikely to score the kind of victory she achieved against Napoleon’s army. That war secured four decades of peace in Europe. Unlikely also is a complete rout similar to the one of Hitler’s army.”

Hold on a moment, let me find that bottle of tequila. This smacks of an exercise in strategic deception, the only martial art in which KGB Russia excels. However, if the statement is genuine, it spells a complete turnaround in Russian dealings with the West.

Her key stratagem is nuclear blackmail, with Putin saying more than once that, yes, he’s aware that Russia can’t compete with the West in conventional warfare. However, Russia is a great nuclear power, at least equal to the US and in some areas superior to it.

Therefore… and out come the usual threats about turning America into radioactive dust, creating a giant strait between Canada and Mexico, putting Britain on the ocean bed and so on. The blackmail worked, by limiting Western aid to the Ukraine to a bare minimum.

If true, that statement means that Putin has forsworn nuclear weapons as a blackmail tactic. If untrue, it’s an attempt to lull the West into a sense of security while Russia prepares a surprise strike. In any case, commentary from Western intelligence analysts would be welcome.

Or, to save time, Trump could just ask his friend Vlad about that. As he once explained, he trusts Putin more than America’s own intelligence services.

 P.S. Tyler Robinson, the murderer of Charlie Kirk, was ‘romantically’ involved with a transsexual furry (a chap who identifies as an animal and walks on all fours wearing furry pelts). Apparently, it was his paramour who shopped Tyler to the police. Can’t you trust anybody?

The Greeks called it ochlocracy, mob rule to you. Aristotle described it as a pathological form of government, one of the three ‘bad’ ones, tyranny and oligarchy being the other two. His teacher Plato saw no valid difference between ochlocracy and democracy, and his spirit must have wafted through Westminster yesterday.

I don’t know how many in the 150,000-strong mob that overran Whitehall yesterday were familiar with such antecedents. If I were to venture a guess, I’d suggest, in round numbers, none.

However lacking their book knowledge was, their tattoos were abundant. To a naked eye their number certainly exceeded one per capita, which neatly harmonised with the feral expressions on faces contorted in hatred. Eyewitnesses report that many of those faces were adorned with broken noses, bespeaking lives lived hard.

The men, and most of the participants were male, came out to protest against unchecked immigration, or rather against immigration tout court. We could discuss the justice of their cause at our leisure, and I don’t doubt for a second that it was just.

Similarly, the Russians who were killing government officials and policemen in 1905-1917 had legitimate grievances. So did the German SA gangs in the 1920s – the Weimar Republic was indeed running Germany into the ground.

Lest I be accused of polemical hyperbole, I’m not equating Tommy Robinson types with either the Bolsheviks or the Nazis. My point is that, when the rule of law disintegrates, and the mob acquires illicit power, the results may well turn out much worse than whatever provoked such mass action.

Some of those who stampeded and screamed their way through Whitehall and Trafalgar Square might have genuinely wanted to engage in lawful protest. Yet such mass outings also invariably attract a violent mob, thuggish trouble-makers out to have the kind of fun they normally have at football matches.

Let me qualify this observation. The likelihood of mayhem at such events depends on the demographic composition of the crowd. For example, when in 2002 another Labour class warrior, Tony Blair, banned hunting with dogs, 450,000 farmers and Barbour-wearing country folk also marched through Westminster.

(Most people I knew were there, but since I’m pathologically averse to crowds of any kind, I stayed at home. This little phobia may have something to do with my first cousin having been trampled to death by a Moscow football crowd when I was little.)

Yet that Liberty and Livelihood March produced no disorder, no attacks on the police and even no littering. This, though the crowd was three times the size of yesterday’s throng.

Relatively small the numbers might have been, but they made up for it by putting their hearts and fists into the action.

The lads came prepared. Not just a sea of Union Jacks but also blown up photographs of Charlie Kirk were waved in the cops’ faces, which strikes me as somewhat incongruous.

First, most people there hadn’t even heard Kirk’s name until his tragic death the other day. Second, he was murdered by an American born and bred, not by a migrant, legal or otherwise. The photos of the girls groomed and raped by Muslim gangs would have been more appropriate, if somewhat less current.

The crowd were also shouting invective alluding to Starmer’s perverse sexual practices and questioning the nature of his relations with his mother. This suggested they found fault not just with the influx of cultural aliens, but also with the whole ethos that made that invasion welcome.

Again, I sympathise with such sentiments wholeheartedly. If it were up to me, that whole subversive lot of our rulers would be run out of Westminster and replaced with… Sorry, that’s where I stumble.

Tommy Robinson and other savage thugs? God forbid. Nigel Farage’s Reform? Perhaps. However, I distrust single-issue politics, even if I happen to agree with the single issue, as I do in this case.

Farage has tried, rather successfully, to broaden his electoral appeal in recent years. But essentially he remains lucid and convincing on one issue only: Britain’s sovereignty, which he correctly sees as threatened in the short term by the EU and in the long term by swarms of aliens diluting the nation’s identity.

This is a vital issue, no question about it. But suppose for a second that the country finally manages to shake the EU dust (with its ECHR particles) off its feet and to secure her borders against those dinghies. What then? Other concerns would come into play, the economy prime among them.

When broaching such subjects, Farage and his people are rather vague, or sometimes even not fundamentally different from Labour. I understand why: not all of Reform’s grassroots support comes from conservative types.

Farage’s earlier party, UKIP, as one of its leaders explained to me, contained as many national socialists as national conservatives, which is why it couldn’t come out fighting the general conservative corner. National socialism, of course, has had a rather bad press due to some widely publicised historical events.

There was a tendency on the part of UKIP to join forces with Tommy Robinson and his thugs, which I found worrying then and still do, now that UKIP has been rebranded as Reform. Yesterday supplied plenty of reasons to worry.

The tattooed mob attacked the police with sticks, stones, empty bottles, flares, traffic cones and everything else within reach. To the accompaniment of Elgar’s music blaring through the sound system, 26 cops got various injuries, including broken teeth, a broken nose, a concussion, a prolapsed disc and a head trauma.

Tommy Robinson, who recently got away with yet another assault charge, was having a field day, making incendiary speeches and egging his troops on. Nigel Farage had wisely refrained from lending his voice or his name to the proceedings.

He harbours prime ministerial ambitions, and there is a groundswell of public support for his Reform. But our first-past-the-post electoral system makes it extremely hard for third parties to translate votes into seats.

In last year’s general elections, Reform got roughly four million votes, 14 per cent of all votes cast. However, that gave the party only one per cent of the seats in the Commons. On the other hand, Labour’s 34 per cent of the popular vote gave it 65 per cent of the seats.

Though I believe that the only natural political home for conservatives is the Tory Party, it has become so useless as to become marginal. It may eventually get its act together, but by that time there may be no Britain qua Britain left for it to govern.

Hence, if Reform can become agile enough to wiggle its way through the thicket of first-past-the-post, it may provide the only realistic alternative to the two main parties, one subversive ideologically, the other by default. However, that battle must be fought in Westminster Palace, not Westminster streets.

If the mob is used as the battering ram of new politics, it will eventually hold the resulting government to ransom, in effect telling it “We put you there, and we can kick you out unless…” What follows that ellipsis may well spell the end of our civilisation.

If there is no other way to stop the systematic – and accelerating – destruction of the country, then Britain has no hope. Here I must caution you against the belief that things have got to be so bad that they can only get better.

Our despair may plumb such depths that we forget history that teaches that things can always get much, much worse. I remember screaming myself hoarse making this point in the run-up to the 2024 election, when many good people were so furious with the useless Tories that they were ready to welcome any alternative.

Yes, tsarist Russia was rotten, but what eventually replaced it was the devil incarnate. The Weimar Republic was incompetent, but what followed was unadulterated evil. I’m not saying the same is likely to happen in Britain. But we’ll be making a grave mistake if we at least don’t consider the possibility.

Predictably, American vocabulary has changed since I left the country in 1988. Hundreds of new words have appeared, old words have acquired new meanings and – more to my point today – old denotations now convey new connotations.

One such is ‘American exceptionalism’. The expression existed in my day, but it was hardly ever used in a positive sense. Liberals associated it with conservatism, conservatives with the loony fringe, and the apolitical masses didn’t use it at all.

That connotation reflected the atmosphere of relative restraint prevalent in public discourse. The political landscape resembled a gently undulating valley with fluffy sheep grazing on the slopes, with only the odd wolf distorting the pastoral serenity. This has since changed into sharply contrasting peaks and troughs regularly shaken up by violent tremors.

Hence ‘American exceptionalism’ has evidently moved from the loony fringe into the Right part of the mainstream where it has been elevated to an ideal. I realised this by listening to the late Charlie Kirk’s orations, all delivered with the sermonising aura typical of American propagandists of both Right and Left.

To me, or any other National Review reader or writer of my day, terms like ‘American exceptionalism’ or ‘American nationalism’ are extremist statements of patriotism, the love of one’s country. And extremism doesn’t belong in conservative – or any other serious – thought.

Such terms turn a laudable feeling into an objectionable cult. Talking to some MAGA people and listening to Kirk’s speeches, one gets the impression that any demarcation line between the two has been smudged.

If we put ourselves in the moccasins of the first Americans, we’ll see that they could hardly avoid a certain amount of pantheistic mysticism when finding themselves face to face with a vast, promising and yet hostile expanse.

Much as they prayed for riches in the future, they knew that the present was more likely to greet them with the fangs of wild beasts or the tomahawks of aboriginal scalpers. The only way to keep going was to lay some groundwork for optimistic fatalism: they had to deify their exploits.

God had to be on their side because no one else was. To find enough resolve to build a new country they had to strive to build a new Jerusalem.

But there is only one real Jerusalem – everything else, including England’s green and pleasant land, can only be its simulacrum. However, this particular American simulacrum has survived to this day, almost 400 years after John Winthrop first described America with a quotation from St Matthew about “a city on a hill”.

The overall sentiment is that America isn’t just different from all other countries. It’s saintlier and therefore morally superior. Hence it’s America’s holy mission to solve every little problem of life internally – and then shine the torch of truth and goodness on other countries, even those that try to shield their eyes from the blinding light.

In 1809 Jefferson, at best a deist, expressed the principle of America as a beacon without relying on biblical references: “Trusted with the destinies of this solitary republic of the world, the only monument of human rights, and the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom and self-government, from hence it is to be lighted up in other regions of the earth, if other regions of the earth shall ever become susceptible of its benign influence.”

Tastes differ but facts shouldn’t: America was not “the only monument… and the sole depository… of freedom and self-government”. Britain, to name one other country, had form in those areas too. But then the puffery of political pietism knows no bounds.

Never in the history of the world, at least not between the collapse of Rome and the emergence of Bolshevik Russia, had there existed another nation so bursting with such refreshingly sanctimonious arrogance. Many have commented on the perverse references to religion in Bolshevik iconography, with atheistic people expected to worship the mummified relics of a secular saint, but few have noticed that the same mimicry is just as robust in America.

Hardly any speech by American leaders from the 18^th century onwards has omitted quasi-religious references to canonised historical figures, whose deeds are routinely described in Biblical terms. “Fellow citizens, the ark of your covenant is the Declaration of Independence,” pronounced John Quincy Adams, and he meant it exactly as it sounded.

Sacral visual imagery also abounds, as do the mock-religious shrines to past leaders. George Washington in particular is worshipped in a religious manner as the ‘Great Father of the Country’.

The interior of the Capitol dome in Washington displays a fresco entitled The Apotheosis of Washington where the sainted Father is surrounded by Baroque angels and also representations of other Founders in contact with various pagan gods, such as Neptune, Vulcan and Minerva.

The Jefferson Memorial, not far away, is also a replica of a pagan shrine, with various quasi-religious references inscribed. Cited, for example, is a quotation from Jefferson’s letter to Washington preaching “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? … Commerce between master and slave is despotism.”

It is useful to remember that these ringing words were uttered by a deist, more likely an agnostic, who had his chattel slaves flogged to mincemeat for trying to escape. The statement would therefore be hypocritical if we were to forget that by then ‘God’ had become the shorthand for ‘America’.

In due course, another term was added to the lexicon of American exceptionalism. In the 1840s the journalist John L. O’Sullivan coined the term ‘manifest destiny’ to describe America’s messianic mission in the world. Said manifest destiny was according to him ‘divine’: it was incumbent upon America “to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man”.

In other words, it was now up to America, not Jesus Christ, to save the world. Americans thus corrected the conservative triad of God, king and country by eliminating the middle element and merging the other two into one.

Such sentiments have always existed at the grassroots of American conservatism. But in my day they were seldom enunciated in the mainstream. American conservatives, such as aforementioned NR readers and writers, tended to be civilised gentlemen, not loudmouthed zealots.

They were the ones who created a minor revolution in the American political mind, making conservatism intellectually, culturally and socially respectable. However, judging by the shift in the connotation of ‘American exceptionalism’, the relay baton has been passed from the gentlemen to the uncouth touts and ideologues.

Connotation has triumphed over denotation, and most activists may be unaware of the historical undercurrents into which I’ve barely dipped. They proudly list ‘exceptionalism’ in their rota of American virtues, and no one questions their conservative credentials.

No one with any influence or public presence, that is. Civilised, erudite, well-spoken conservatives still exist in America, and in fact I know a few who are quite appalled. But they no longer have an audible voice. The Right has fallen into the hands of shrill demagogues who confuse jingoism with patriotism, chest-thumping ardour with arguments and semi-literate musings with rhetoric.

That’s why European conservatives don’t see the MAGA types as their kin. Conservatism, as I never tire of arguing, is above all a matter of style and temperamental predisposition, not ideology. A real conservative wouldn’t be caught dead sporting a legible baseball cap and spouting slogans in elementary-school English.

And of course, loud protestations of American exclusivity have a rather limited international appeal. This is unfortunate because, issue by issue, the MAGA types and British conservatives agree more than they disagree.

However, much as they may be consonant in their ideas, they are stylistically incompatible. That makes them incompatible, full stop.

When MAGA activist Charlie Kirk was murdered yesterday, he was doing what he did best: debating politics with students on their campus. A sniper bullet hit him in the neck, and life gushed out of his severed artery.

One would expect that brutal crime to bring people of different political views together: Right, Left of Centre, they are all members of civilised society. And civilised people react to the murder of even political opponents in, well, a civilised way.

By way of illustration, I’d like to offer my own response to the murder of the Left-wing Labour MP Jo Cox on 16 June 2016.

To set the scene, Mrs Cox espoused ideas and policies I found as deplorable as American ‘liberals’ doubtless found the ideas and policies of Charlie Kirk (some of his pronouncements don’t sit well with me either, but that’s a different matter). With that in mind, I invite you to compare my reaction with theirs.

Lest you accuse me of bragging, I’m using my own words not out of egotism but out of laziness. I know many other conservatives wrote similar things, but it would take time and effort to look up their comments. My own, however, are at my fingertips:

“I don’t care what objectionable or noble causes Mrs Cox supported, what kind of politician she was or wasn’t, what her career might or might not have held in store for her.

“When a young woman in the prime of her life is butchered by a lunatic degenerate, when she dies with the last words ‘My pain is too much’, when she leaves a bereaved husband and two motherless children behind, I can feel the tragedy of it all as much as anyone. I pray for her soul and for her family; I hope God will judge her with kindness and she’ll rest in peace.”

So much for the point. Now comes the counterpoint of ‘liberal’ social media comments on the murder of a 31-year-old man leaving behind a young wife and two little children:

“Hitler giving Charlie Kirk a tour in hell.”

“He was “a f***ing Nazi. And you know what kind of Nazi is the best Nazi? A dead one. Thank God that s***stain of a person is no longer in this world”.

“Why didn’t Charlie Kirk just debate the bullet? He would have easily deflected.”

“I don’t know I think getting killed by your favorite thing in the world is sweet. It’s a nice gesture.” [A reference to Kirk’s championship of the Second Amendment.]

“If he doesn’t make it at least he died with the love of his life, school shootings.” [Ditto]

“This wouldn’t have happened if Charlie Kirk had been armed.” [Ditto]

Such feral gloating is a verbal equivalent of a savage devouring the liver of his dead enemy. Alas, this is the tonal quality of current political debate, and not only in the US.

People no longer have opponents they want to prove wrong. They have enemies they want to see dead.

It hasn’t always been like this. For example, in the early ‘50s William F Buckley published two books that attacked the liberal mindset dominant in America, God and Man at Yale and McCarthy and His Enemies. Tempers were running hot at the time, with McCarthy accusing every liberal of being a communist and every communist of being a Soviet spy.

Not all of his accusations were justified, although many were. But his language was intemperate, emotive, often rude and slanderous. McCarthy’s targets responded in kind, and the air was think with invective.

Then Buckley’s books came out, with one showing the totalitarian nature of ‘liberalism’ at Yale, the other defending McCarthy’s message if not necessarily his style. Most reviewers, some of whom were mentioned in the books by name, took issue with Buckley’s assertions, indeed with his politics as such.

Yet most of them complimented his style and verve, saying how pleased they were to have such a talented and erudite opponent. Today he’d be getting death threats.

The level of public discourse has dropped below the lower limit possible within a viable civilisation. Political zealotry now rides roughshod over manners, style, integrity, even common decency. People no longer hold their speech to such tests, or even the tests of logic and common sense.

As they move farther and farther away from the source of our civilisation, they gradually lose all links with it. Their own passions, however expressed, take precedence over civility, that irreplaceable cognate of civilisation.

That turns them into barbarians, which word originally designated those outside civilisation, in that case Greek. And barbarians don’t recognise any checks on their words and increasingly their deeds. Not all of them vent their feelings with a high-powered rifle, but many of them can do so and, given the chance, will.

People who fear the possibility of apocalyptic nuclear war should look no further than social media comments on Charlie Kirk’s death. Those who cheer a homicidal act are capable of pushing the suicidal button. Having slipped the shackles of civilisation, they haven’t replaced them with any other restraints.

The political arena is resonant with jarring shrieks, and the most piercing ones come from savages incongruously called ‘liberals’ or those more appropriately called ‘populists’. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, I dare say.

Charlie Kirk, RIP

Let’s see, and the way to see is to compare the president’s response to two aerial events yesterday.

In one, the Israeli Air Force struck a Qatar hotel in which a group of Hamas chieftains were holed up. Five terrorists were killed, although apparently the gang leaders escaped with their lives.

In the other, Polish, Dutch and Italian fighter planes were scrambled to shoot down Russian drones invading Poland’s airspace. This was followed by another monstrous Russian attack on Ukrainian cities, including Kiev.

Which of these incidents caused Trump’s fury? To make it easier for you to answer this question, let’s set the contextual scene.

Poland is a NATO country, bound with the US by a mutual defence treaty. She is a staunch ally of the West and has been a fierce opponent of Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine.

In addition to any altruistic urges, this stance is motivated by self-interest. Polish leaders realise that Putin’s plans go beyond the Ukraine. That understanding sets them apart from Putin’s mouthpiece Peter Hitchens, who wrote a few days ago: “I am still not sure what Putin wanted to achieve [by attacking the Ukraine]…”

This uncertainty is staggering, considering that Putin and his minions never made their aims a secret. At the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Putin stated that his objective was to “de-Nazify and demilitarise” the Ukraine.

Of course, according to Kremlin propaganda, the Ukraine’s whole government and most of her people are Nazis. Moreover, the country undeniably has an army. Hence, what Putin said was tantamount to a commitment to destroy the Ukraine as a sovereign state and turn her into a Russian colony.

And not just the Ukraine. In his incendiary Munich speech of 2007, Putin spelled out his long-term plan to rebuild the Soviet empire, thereby undoing “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century.”

This ratcheted up spittle-sputtering hysteria, when hardly a day goes by without Putin or his henchmen threatening to annihilate NATO countries with nuclear arms. Putting it in simple terms, Poland is our friend, whereas Russia is a fascist country, our enemy and a source of constant danger.

That’s why the provocative violation of Poland’s, which is to say NATO’s, airspace can be justifiably treated as an act of war, or at least a rehearsal for it. Poland’s Prime Minister was absolutely right when warning that “we are closer to war than any time since World War Two”.

The other incident also involved a clash between our friend, Israel, and our enemies, Hamas and Qatar. Hamas is a diabolical terrorist organisation whose aim in life is to annihilate Israel and murder every Jew living there.

Since in that region Israel is the only reliable ally of the West in general and the US in particular, and Hamas is Israel’s enemy, it’s our enemy as well. And Qatar is the major Sunni supporter of Hamas.

Doha has hospitably housed Hamas’s political office since 2012, and over the years Qatar has financed Hamas to the tune of $1.8 billion. That’s even more than the cost of the airliner the Qataris presciently gave Trump as a gift, which he gratefully accepted.

All this makes the question in the title above almost rhetorical. Did the Poles offer Trump expensive airliners, as the Qataris did? They didn’t. Did their leaders ever describe Trump as a genius, which Putin did many times? Did they hell. Have they been critical about Trump’s kowtowing to Putin, as the Russian juggernaut moves closer to Poland’s border? You bet they have.

There you have, the answer to that question. Trump ignored the provocation against NATO (us) and was furious about Israel’s strike on Hamas (them).

The White House said that Trump felt “very bad” about Israel’s strike on her enemies, and ours. Moreover, by his own admission, Trump tried to sabotage the attack.

He wrote that, on finding out about the raid, “I immediately directed special envoy Steve Witkoff to inform the Qataris of the impending attack, which he did, however, unfortunately, too late to stop the attack.”

Had it not been too late, the Qataris might have been able to thwart the attack and ideally kill some Israeli pilots. Nice. But that’s not all:

“I view Qatar as a strong ally and friend and feel very badly about the location of the attack. I want ALL of the hostages, and bodies of the dead, released, and this War to END, NOW!”

Next time Trump is in Qatar, he ought to peek into the BOOKSHOP WINDOWS there. He’ll find prominently DISPLAYED copies of Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, plus any number of other Nazi and anti-Semitic TITLES.

Nor is it just the Qataris’ reading habits. They also act in the spirit of such literature, supporting by word and deed not just Hamas but also every other anti-Israeli and anti-Western terrorist gang.

If Qatari emirs – and Russian dictators – are Trump’s friends, then who are his enemies? I don’t know, ask him. I can only observe that he and his underlings are more critical of America’s Western allies than they are of the kind of scum one finds in Qatari or Russian government offices.

For example, both Trump and Vance are scathing about Britain’s deficit of free speech. Without in any way disputing such charges, let’s just say that those chaps aren’t similarly critical about the situation with free speech in Russia or for that matter Qatar.

It’s true that Britain’s clamps on free expression ill-behove a civilised Western country. But our sins are minor compared with the fascist oppression in Russia, where critics of the regime are routinely imprisoned or even murdered, or with the Sharia dictatorship in Qatar, where independent political bodies and trade unions are banned (and whose courts treat a woman’s testimony as worth half that of a man).

Beware of Qataris bearing airliners and of Russians promising huge property development concessions, one is tempted to say. But since we know the answer to the question in the title, such advice would fall on deaf, or else deliberately plugged, ears.

P.S. Now I’m in the business of dispensing unsolicited advice, I’d suggest to Hitchens that he try not to be so blatant about his role as Putin’s shill.

If he must regurgitate Russian lies, one trick he may try is at least not using exactly the same language, word for word. Thus the Kremlin line on the on-going war is that it was started by the West using the Ukraine as its proxy.

Here’s Hitchens, impersonating a parrot: “I think the West doesn’t especially want peace. Western policy in this region has the aim of preventing a Russian recovery… It means that the West uses Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia.”

Oh, is that why the West transferred untold amounts of capital and technology to a post-perestroika Russia? I get it, that was a ploy to conceal its dastardly ulterior designs.

For the same reason, Europe kept Putin’s economy afloat by getting most of its gas from Russian fields and pipelines, those that wouldn’t have even existed but for American and European exploration and production technology, pipeline equipment and computer knowhow. Really, there’s no limit to the West’s perfidy.

There is one to Hitchens’s own perfidy though: he isn’t smart enough to conceal it.  

A friend has sent me a video of Bertrand Russell’s 1952 interview, and I enjoyed every one of its 30 minutes.

The enjoyment, I hasten to allay your fears for my sanity, had nothing to do with what he said and everything to do with how he said it. One just doesn’t hear such patrician cadences any longer.

The last person to strangulate every vowel in such an irresistible manner was our late Queen, roughly at the time of Bertie Russell’s interview. Later in life, Her Majesty somewhat flattened out her accent, much to my chagrin.

King Charles took royal pronunciation down another tiny notch, and his children a couple of notches more. If this tendency persists, our future monarchs will sound like Michael Caine or Bob Hoskins, which will be most unfortunate (much as I admire both actors).

The phonetic appeal of Russell’s diction prevented me from doing what I would have done with any other recording of unalloyed rubbish: turn it off after five minutes.

Russell started out his academic career as a mathematician, later switching to philosophy. He had made the transition, he explained, to see if philosophy could lead to religious faith. Instead, it led him to lifelong atheism.

I don’t necessarily believe that a man without faith thereby exhibits a lapse of intelligence. What I found harder to dismiss was Russell’s misunderstanding of the link between faith and philosophy, which sounds like a misunderstanding of both.

By taking up philosophy as a possible path to faith, Russell didn’t just put the cart before the horse. He put the horse down, only to be amazed that the cart didn’t become self-propelled.

Jacques Maritain defined philosophy as the science of first principles, in the same sense in which physics and chemistry are the sciences of matter. Anyone wishing to take up natural science has to start from the assumption that nature exists, irrespective of his own sensory perception of it.

By the same token, anyone taking up the science of first principles has to proceed from the assumption that first principles exist. His study may later disabuse him of that notion, but any search for truth, be it philosophical or physical, has to start from a working hypothesis.

Therefore, philosophical quest can’t, nor can be expected to, lead to faith in God. Faith, on the other hand, may serve as a powerful springboard for a dive into the troubled waters of philosophy. The thinker may eventually decide that his philosophy doesn’t justify faith, which would be a lamentable conclusion but at least one reached from the right premise.

I can’t judge the quality of Russell’s work in mathematical logic, Principia Mathematica, that he wrote with AN Whitehead. Anything mathematical takes me out of my depth, but general logic doesn’t. By the sound of it, Lord Russell had the opposite problem.

When asked who was the most influential philosopher in the contemporaneous world (1952), he said Marx, although Russell wouldn’t dignify him with the name ‘philosopher’. I agree with him there, and in general one has to say that, unlike his Bloomsbury friends, Russell wasn’t taken in by Marxism or Bolshevism.

When he visited Russia in the 1920s, he found its government hideous, which was a welcome diversion from the panegyrics mouthed by the likes of Shaw and the Webbs. But then he showed how impossible it is even for a confirmed atheist to break out of the Christian mindset of our civilisation.

The problem with Marx, explained Russell to his American interviewer, is that he not so much loved the poor as hated the rich. And true philosophy has to be animated by love, not hatred.

He would have found it difficult to insist on this crypto-Christian belief when talking, say, to Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, who both had a fair claim to the title of philosopher, the latter perhaps the less fair one.

Then the subject veered towards war and peace. Russell was a pacifist, and the interviewer drew his attention to that aspect of his philosophy. The tactful American didn’t mention the fact that Russell’s campaign against the First World War earned him a six-month stint in prison.

He did bring up that global conflict, and Russell explained that he had never opposed war in general, only that war. He was in favour of Britain’s involvement in the Second World War, however.

He realised that, “War was always a great evil, but in some particularly extreme circumstances, it may be the lesser of two evils.”

I don’t know if Lord Russell was aware of this, but he repeated, almost verbatim, St Augustine’s teaching on the subject of just war. I doubt Russell ever read The City of God, but yet again he was unable to shake the tethers of Western civilisation, aka Christendom.

A less tactful interviewer might have mentioned that Russell’s understanding of war against Nazism as the “lesser of two evils” came to him rather late in the conflict, in 1943 to be exact.

Throughout the 1930s he was a rank appeaser. For example, in a personal letter written in 1937, when Nazism was already in full swing, Russell offered this idea:

“If the Germans succeed in sending an invading army to England we should do best to treat them as visitors, give them quarters and invite the commander in chief to dine with the prime minister.” Across the Channel, Pierre Laval got executed for less.

But yes, confirmed Lord Russell, he was a committed pacifist opposed to any war other than the one that had ended five years earlier. For example, the West should find an accommodation with the Soviet Union, much as Lord Russell deplored Bolshevism.

In general, he had high hopes for the world, even though it was demonstrably in dire straits at the moment. The interviewer perked up and asked Lord Russell to outline the basis for such hopes. Or, putting it differently, could Lord Russell please identify the most pressing problems and suggest solutions for them?

Russell was happy to oblige. One potentially deadly problem with the world is that there exist too many countries, each bristling with weapons and some even with nuclear arms. The solution offered itself to the anti-Marxist genius of mathematical logic: there should be just one world government, in possession of all armaments, from catapults to atom bombs.

Just as he seemed to be unaware of the Christian provenance of some of his ideas, Lord Russell obviously didn’t realise that the idea of a single world government came right out of Marx’s playbook. It’s an old socialist dream, which happens to be everyone else’s nightmare.

The interviewer was so taken aback that he didn’t delve any deeper. I would have been curious to ask about the practicalities involved. Who, besides Lord Russell, would be a member of the world cabinet? All governments being to some extent instruments of coercion, how would that pan-global body come up with policies and laws, ensuring that the former be carried out and the latter obeyed?

And so forth, up to the final question: Doesn’t Lord Russell realise that, even if such a dystopic monstrosity were possible, it would be so despotic that by comparison Hitler and Stalin would look like humanitarians trying to get in touch with their feminine side?

But fine, one government for all, wars are impossible, that’s one problem out of the way. Any others?

Yes there are, said Lord Russell. Two, to be precise. One is that all the countries of America, Europe, Asia and Africa, indeed all the continents, ought to be equally wealthy. Otherwise sooner or later the poor countries would attack the rich ones, and war would ensue.

That was going Marx one better. Lord Russell pushed socialist egalitarianism beyond parochial social classes and all the way to a global scale. The question of how that laudable equality was to be achieved wasn’t asked, which is a shame. I’m sure the great philosopher would have emphasised his credentials by offering a mathematically logical solution.

And the other problem? There Lord Russell changed horses in mid-stream, dismounting Marx and mounting Malthus. It’s overpopulation, he explained.

The population of the world must remain “stationary” lest it run out of food. Unlike Malthus, Lord Russell eschewed number crunching. He didn’t repeat the fallacy that, while the world’s population increased in a geometric progression, food supply only grew in an arithmetic one. Hence we’d all starve to death before long.

Actually, the world overproduces food, and many governments keep the supply down artificially. But the ‘how’ question would again have been more interesting.

By what diabolical measures would Lord Russell prevent people from multiplying like rabbits? How far would he go in his commitment to eugenics? His contemporary, GB Shaw, for example, advocated a mass cull of all wrinklies reaching the ripe age of 70. They should all be asked to justify their continued existence and, if they couldn’t, they’d get the chop.

GBS assumed he himself could offer convincing reasons for living past 70. But he’d have had no problem with turning the world into an abattoir of old-age pensioners. Mr Marx, meet Mr Hitler, you have so much to talk about.

Russell lived for another 18 years after that interview, which he put to good use by going on CND marches sponsored by the KGB, protesting against American crimes in Vietnam and Israeli ones in Palestine, and joining forces with communists like Jean-Paul Sartre to call for forming a tribunal to bring those criminal regimes to justice.

But that interview was bad enough. It made me glad I don’t try to overachieve by studying mathematical logic and its relation to philosophy. Such disciplines clearly play funny tricks with a man’s mind.

My friend, the Rev. Dr Peter Mullen, writes brilliantly about Christianity pervading every pore of the West’s body, this unbeknown to most people.

Even those who’ve never seen the inside of a church, except perhaps as sightseers, and who have no faith in God but much hatred of ‘religion’ (lumping all religions together) still have their instincts, customs, culture and language shaped by the formative creed of our civilisation.

This is a subject for at least a book, better still a whole library. The best one can do in a short article is snip off a fragment of the whole and take a closer look at it, ideally without stepping on Peter’s toes.

One such fragment is politics and the institutions thereof, and this subject may be more elusive than some of the others. After all, Britain apart, all Western states are constitutionally separated from the church.

Britain is different in letter but not in spirit: we do have an established church, but these days it worships at the altar of wokery, not that of Christ the Saviour. It’s there mainly for appearances’ sake, but the appearances aren’t totally meaningless.

Our head of state is divinely anointed, which maintains historical and spiritual continuity, while conferring some residual dignity on governance. This hardly amounts to anything more than lip service to God, but it’s better than no service at all.

Our laws have scriptural antecedents, and even a mere hundred years ago British judges routinely quoted the Bible to justify their rulings. But what about our political institutions?

The point I like to make is that Christianity isn’t only the teaching by Christ but also, even more so, the teaching about Christ. Revelation is a slow-release process, and in his earthly life Jesus only vouchsafed faith to his disciples, leaving them to build it into a religion and ultimately a civilisation.

All the pronouncements made by Jesus and recorded by the evangelists would have taken just over two hours to utter. Yet his ministry probably lasted over three years. Surely Jesus must have said many other things that his disciples either misunderstood or forgot?

My contention is that, when it comes to Western politics, it’s not so much Christ’s commandments as his person that exerted a formative influence. The nature of that person was put down on paper in 451 AD, at the maritime town of Chalcedon.

Jesus, stated the Council of Chalcedon, is fully man and fully God, the second hypostasis of the Trinity. He has two distinct natures united in one person without confusion, change, division, or separation. This union remains an unfathomable mystery, but the influence of Christ’s duality on Western politics is easier to grasp.

The Creeds, both Apostles’ and Nicene, derive their name from the Latin word Credo, “I believe…”, the first word in both. This is a statement of private, individual faith, and it appropriately starts with the singular first-person pronoun.

However, the Lord’s Prayer, the most significant Christian supplication because Jesus himself provided the exact wording, starts with a plural pronoun ‘Our Father’, not ‘My Father’.

Unlike the Creeds, the Lord’s Prayer isn’t individual but collective, emphasising the corporate nature of the faith that turns it into a religion. Thus the two most significant statements of Christianity reflect another aspect of Christ’s duality: all in one, and one in all.

When it came to creating the structural organisation of a Catholic world church, this duality begat the complementary, intertwined concepts of subsidiarity and solidarity.

Subsidiarity means devolving decentralised responsibility to the lowest sensible level. Thus whatever problems arise can be solved by the most local group capable of solving them, which ensures efficiency and preserves local autonomy.

Solidarity, on the other hand, emphasises the shared dignity of all people, encouraging empathy, cooperation and collective responsibility. Higher levels of the Church lay down doctrine, but they only ever intervene when local authorities need help implementing the general principles established by central authority. However, central authority must proceed in the knowledge that its function is to assist local institutions, not to supplant them.

By and large, the Church has been able to preserve this organic blend of the general and particular, corporate and individual, central and local.

Now, during the four centuries between the sack of Rome in 410 AD and the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 AD, the Church had to assume a great deal of secular authority. It had to fill the political and administrative vacuum that existed between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the birth of the Carolingian Holy Roman Empire.

Those centuries are commonly called Dark, although many serious thinkers have always disputed that designation. After all, the embryos of many inchoate Western institutions, including political ones, were created during that period.

And, since the Church wielded a great deal of secular power then and managed to keep it for several centuries thereafter, many political institutions of the West incorporated at birth the structural principles of Church organisation – specifically those of subsidiarity and solidarity.

In politics, they were translated into localism and centralism. I’d suggest that the unity of the two, and the potential conflict between them, define our politics today, much as they did in the Middle Ages and every epoch ever since.

The most successful political formations of modernity are those that feature a workable balance between centralism and localism, the secular offshoots of solidarity and subsidiarity. Conversely, the least successful, most corrupt and often evil modern regimes are those in which central governments ride roughshod over local autonomy and authority, ultimately over the individual.

The more local authority the central Western state usurps, the more it distorts the balance of subsidiarity and solidarity – the more decisively it severs its Christian roots and the more readily it embraces evil.

The clash between political conservatism and various forms of socialism, be it oxymoronic ‘democratic’, unvarnished ‘communist’ or fascistic ‘national’, can be ultimately reduced to the struggle between centralism and localism ensuing when they are no longer in organic balance.

This balance lies at the foundation of all modern political systems, including British republican monarchy, French monarchic republicanism and American conflation of the two.

Yet few British, French or American politicians – and even fewer voters – are aware of the debt their politics owes Christianity. Believers among them have forgotten about that link, while the atheists desperately want to do so.

But the link is there, writ large not just in theology or political philosophy, but in history – as it continues to be made every day.  

A coalition of two or more countries doesn’t just appear out of thin air.

Make a pile of all the world’s 195 countries, take a random handful out, and you’ll find that all the countries in your hand have both common interests and serious differences.

If you then wish to bring them together in a coalition, you have to convince them to shunt their serious differences aside for the sake of capitalising on their common interests.

You could do that by gentle persuasion, hoping they’ll listen to reason. But if those particular countries are unlikely to listen to you, no matter how reasonable you sound, then there’s only one other thing you could do. You should pose such a dire threat to those countries that they join forces of their own accord.

This clarity of understanding came to me thanks to Donald Trump’s foreign policy, and I have to thank the president for that. I’m also grateful to Messrs Xi, Modi and Putin for providing a visual aid for any future course in the art of making a coalition.

When Trump started his trade war on the world, laying about him like Macduff, smiting friend and foe alike, I mentioned to my American MAGA interviewer that America may eventually run out of friends and allies. “We don’t care,” he replied with typical aplomb.

The recently concluded summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Tianjin should have disabused him of such blithe self-confidence, but probably didn’t. MAGA chaps are zealots, and zealotry is impervious to such incidentals as evidence and reason.

The three principal SCO countries, China, India and Russia, have clearly been pushed into a close-knit alliance against the West in general and the US in particular. This means they’ve agreed to downplay their differences and coalesce on their common interest: confrontation with a US-dominated West.

If this coalition perseveres, my MAGA interviewer will soon realise that America can no longer go it alone. She needs all the allies she can get because neither the US nor indeed the West as a whole any longer boasts an overwhelming strategic, economic and military superiority over those three countries combined. (It’s debatable whether this exists even vis-à-vis China by herself, but this is a debate for another time.)

The two evil regimes, Chinese and Russian, are anti-West viscerally and, shall we say, ontologically. Even so, there exist serious, perhaps irreconcilable, differences between them that a wise policy on the part of the West could have exploited.

Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, China has been steadily colonising the Russian Far East and large parts of Siberia. Those regions are visibly moving away from Moscow and closer to Peking, something Russia is helpless to prevent but doubtless sees as a matter of grave concern.

India, meanwhile, has been moving closer to the West for years. The country inherited most of her political institutions from Britain, English is her unifying language (I mean India’s, not so much Britain’s), and no a priori enmity towards the West exists there.

There is, or rather has been, a fair amount of hostility to China though. India and China have teetered on the brink of war, possibly nuclear, for decades. Though the relations between the two countries have somewhat normalised in recent years, they are still far from normal.

Both keep huge army contingents on the border, and there are still no direct flights between India and China. The movement of people between the two countries is limited, and, even if they are no longer mortal enemies, they are certainly not friends.

Russia and India have been traditionally friendlier, and India, along with China, remains Russia’s significant trading partner. This isn’t to say that there are no frictions there. For example, both Russia and China have castigated India’s membership in Quad, the security bloc of the US, India, Japan and Australia.

India’s stand on Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine has been ambivalent. Let’s call it a position of benevolent neutrality, a tacit support of the Ukraine and no support of Russia (other than buying Russian oil). At the same time, the growing proximity between Russia and China, with the former increasingly looking like a vassal of the latter, threatens India’s strategic interests in Asia.

India is also concerned about Russia’s courtship of Pakistan. For example, Russia announced last year that she would welcome Pakistan into the BRICS group, much to India’s displeasure.

In short, there are numerous fault lines among the three major SCO members, and subtle diplomacy could have easily turned them into fissures. But Trump doesn’t do subtle diplomacy.

His first instinct is that of a bully, the new sheriff explaining to the folks who is now running their town. Except that the folks may form a united front and run the sheriff out of town before sundown.

I doubt my metaphor of a Western film is accurate, but this is essentially the situation Trump’s ill-informed aggressiveness has created. Three major countries have put their differences aside to concentrate on their main interest: standing up to America.

Some commentators hasten to allay such fears. The new coalition, they say correctly, lacks any positive programme of action, other than economic cooperation. What has brought it together is largely the negative desideratum of confronting the West.

True. But then what was the positive programme of NATO, an organisation that secured relative peace in Europe from 1949 to 2022? The sole purpose of NATO was strictly negative: containment of Soviet aggression.

Going back a bit further, what was the positive impulse behind the wartime alliance of the US, Britain and the USSR? The impulse was strictly negative: stopping Hitler in his tracks.

The coalition of China, India and Russia may be negative in its aims, but such negativity makes it stronger, not weaker. It gives the alliance a sharp focus, something that the US (and the West in general) sorely and demonstrably lacks.

Though his failure to stop the war in the Ukraine has sobered him up a bit, Trump is still striking out in all directions, picking fights against all and sundry, pushing former allies towards China and away from America.

For example, take the totally unnecessary brawl he picked with Brazil, the biggest economy in Latin America, and a country generally well-disposed towards the US. Out of the blue, he announced that Brazil would face 50 per cent tariffs, the highest in the world so far.

Brazil, Trump falsely claimed, runs a trade surplus with the US. In fact, Brazil runs a multi-million deficit in its trade with the US, but the punitive tariffs had nothing to do with trade. They were punishment meted out as retaliation for the prosecution of former Brazilian president Bolsonaro, who was a Trump ally.

This was a mafioso payback more than an exercise of sound politics, diplomacy or economics. So how long before Brazil joins China, India and Russia in their anti-American, anti-Western coalition? At this pace, America First may soon become America Alone, which will be a tragedy for the West at large.

The title above serves a dual purpose. In addition to introducing this article, it can do extra duty as the title of Trump’s next book, the sequel to The Art of Making a Deal. May I also suggest a subtitle, How to Turn the World Against You?