The leaders of the West are not doing their duty. It may already be too late, but everyone with an ounce of clout or influence must now use it to end the US-Israel attack on Iran. And let us not forget that those two countries started this war. They attacked, an action which all through history has put the attacker in the wrong.

If the war is not soon stopped, then an economic and political crisis worse than anything since 1945 may well be triggered. It will be accompanied by yet another mass movement of countless refugees into Western Europe. And for what?

Will we never grow out of the Utopian fantasy that we can go stomping round the world, telling other countries what to do? It is as if we have been hypnotised. All someone needs to do is to talk of Winston Churchill or of ‘appeasement’, and grown men and women lose their minds and start howling for war. Some seem to long for it.

In the early moments of Donald Trump’s current spasm, the leaders of Reform UK and the Tory Party instantly piled in to endorse the Trump-Netanyahu assault. They had time to think before they spoke. But they couldn’t be bothered. Like so many modern ‘conservatives’ and ‘patriots’, they have fallen in love with foreign war, quite unaware that war is the enemy of conservatism and the ally of the Left.

For instance, has it still not sunk in that the vast waves of migration from Africa and the Middle East are the direct results of the wars we kept starting or fuelling, in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Syria? Even now, there are people amid the ruins of their former homes, in their demolished cities, all over Iran, preparing for the long trudge westwards that ends with them struggling aboard a rubber dinghy on the French coast, headed for Kent or Sussex.

You may meet them, sooner than you think, in an English suburb. If you do, it will be a poorer, bleaker place than it is now.

The rising price of oil and gas is hugely dangerous to our tottering economy, threatening the same deadly combination of inflation and unemployment that hit us after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, only much worse, for we are so much weaker and so much more indebted now.

Those politicians who began by backing this attack, and urging closer British involvement in it, must have known that the war was an act of aggression.

Nobody has ever come up with any serious evidence that Iran was preparing its own attack.

On the contrary. Informed Americans admit that there was no urgent threat.

One key Trump aide, Joseph Kent, last week resigned from his job as the director of the President’s National Counterterrorism Centre. He said he had done so because Iran was not an imminent threat to the United States and that the US entered the war amid ‘pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby’.

The President, a small man, always tries to belittle his critics.

And he did so again, saying he ‘always thought [Kent] was weak on security, very weak on security’. But it will be hard for him to brush aside this criticism.

Mr Kent is more Trumpist than Mr Trump. He is an ultra-loyalist who has defended some of the President’s most questionable actions. But he still holds to what used to be Mr Trump’s position – of opposition to stupid foreign wars.

He has an impressive record of military service, and of sacrifice for his country. His wife was killed while serving with the US Navy in Iraq. Let them try to say his word does not count.

And if Mr Kent, all alone, can now stand up to the most powerful man on the planet and say that he is wrong, so can the leaders of what is left of the civilised world. It may not work, though it may. Mr Trump has a long record of chickening out if his blustering aggressions turn bad on him.

For certain, there is no point in doing nothing, or muttering among ourselves. It is positive folly to flatter Mr Trump with obedience and praise. The attack on Iran is an outrage against common sense as well as a breach of all civilised rules of behaviour.

It won’t do to justify it by saying what a vile regime Iran has. This is a pretext. Lots of countries have vile regimes. Many of them are our allies. Mr Trump is not attacking Iran because he can’t stand despots or leaders who kill their own people.

He’s fine with Egypt, which has a military junta that massacres pro-democracy demonstrators on its streets. He gets on well with Saudi Arabia, which actually cut up one of its dissidents with bone saws. He’s cool with Nato Turkey, which is rapidly turning into a rather nasty dictatorship.

There is certainly a good precedent from history, which gives Britain a special right to tell Mr Trump to grow up and behave.

In the midst of the Suez crisis in 1956, when Sir Anthony Eden was equally madly invading Egypt, the phone in his office in Downing Street began to ring insistently. Eden was elsewhere, so a civil servant, William Clark, lifted the receiver, only to hear the infuriated tones of President Dwight D. Eisenhower yelling across the Atlantic ‘Anthony, you must have gone out of your mind!’ The President was enraged. ‘It was some time before I was able to persuade him that I was not Anthony,’ Clark recalled.

There is little doubt that Ike got through to Eden later. The US threatened us with economic ruin if we did not call off the invasion. In the meantime, the US Navy were sent to harass and obstruct British ships in the Mediterranean, fouling our radar and sonar and flying their aircraft aggressively low over our fleet.

The US Navy’s then chief, Admiral Arleigh Burke, explicitly discussed opening fire on the Royal Navy with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

So Mr Trump can keep his sentimental appeals to a non-existent soppy relationship between London and Washington. And we can feel free to tell him to stop before he wrecks the world.