But an even graver nuclear danger lies between East Asia and Europe, in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. After six years of kowtowing to the Iranian mullahs, including private pleas from President Obama to Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Washington's diplomacy has not stopped Iran's march towards nuclear weapons, and there is little likelihood of the administration's soft-touch approach changing in the last two years of Obama's term. No Sunni Muslim ruler is prepared to live in the same neighbourhood as an undeterred Shia nuclear power. Thus an Iran possessing, or thought to be on the threshold of possessing, nuclear weapons will undoubtedly mean a nuclear-armed Saudi Arabia, a nuclear-armed Egypt, and quite probably a nuclear-armed Gulf statelet or two. But whether deterrence will actually work in that volatile neighbourhood, beset as it is by congenital political corruption and inflamed religious passions, is an outcome on which no thoughtful analyst would wager.

Meanwhile, Iran's client Hezbollah has virtually destroyed Lebanon, as Putin's client, Bashar al-Assad, has virtually destroyed Syria; a not-so-mini-caliphate has declared itself in otherwise-ungoverned northern Syria and within the rubble of an Iraq left by Obama to fend for itself; and despite burning enough carbon in aircraft fuel to cause green hearts to skip a beat, John Kerry's shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East has not only failed to produce a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, it has empowered the most radical elements in the West Bank and Gaza while exposing Israel, the Middle East's only mature democracy and a beacon of economic and technological development, to even more vile opprobrium from the world's witless (and worse).

The list could go on and on: Latin America, which once seemed poised on the edge of sustainable breakthroughs to democratic politics and genuine market economies, is reverting to its historic bad habits of corrupt authoritarianism and mercantilism. The Castro brothers remain firmly in control of an impoverished island-prison 90 miles off the coast of Florida (from which Putin thumbs his nose at the self-bound Gulliver to the north), and continue to export their half-baked ideology (and Cuban internal security forces) to Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Africa, in which Obama pledged to take a special interest, continues to crumble as one failed state after another cannot provide even basic security (Nigeria and Boko Haram) or indulges in endless and pointless bloodletting (Central African Republic). Pakistan remains arguably the most dangerous state on the planet. And Afghanistan, where Obama & Co once pledged to see through what they regarded as the "good war", is being abandoned by America; at the time of writing, the Taliban is back in business in Kabul, in terrorist mode at the moment but with larger ambitions for the future.

Over the past year, the drama of Ukraine and the Obama administration's failures to respond vigorously to Russian aggression have led more than one American commentator to evoke memories of Baldwin, Chamberlain, and the appeasement strategies of the 1930s — a comparison that comes all the more easily as Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov continues to play the role of a more polished Joachim von Ribbentrop, deploying the Big Lie with a straight face and getting no pushback from John Kerry, the Samuel Hoare of the moment. But Baldwin authorised the arming of the RAF with Hurricanes and Spitfires, and Chamberlain, however reluctantly, took his Polish "red line" seriously. Barack Obama, for his part, is complementing appeasement by dismantling the US military in all its component parts. And the gassed victims of Bashar al-Assad, who paid the ultimate price in their quest for a measure of political decency in their country, bear mute witness from the grave to what a "red line" means to the 44th President of the United States.