John Bolton’s sacking delighted Iran – but the world is suffering under Trump and his fellow fragile tyrants

Trump has no foreign policy, and the ‘world stage’ has splintered. No wonder journalism struggles to describe the outrageous new reality

The sanest comment to emerge this week from the latest fandango in the Washington lunatic asylum came from Iran.

Asked for an official response to the political murder of John Bolton – these Richard III killings, in which the characters are either smothered or stabbed by tweets, are, after all, routine to the point of absurdity – the Iranian foreign ministry ponderously replied that it did not “interfere in internal American affairs”. It was a wonderful po-faced response to the ever more outrageously comic Trumpian theatre.

True, the various supreme and less supreme leaders of Tehran performed a little dance of joy at the demise of Bolton the “warmonger”, but at least the description was spot-on.

Normally sane western correspondents, however, performed their own routine: having all admitted (rather late but many times) that Trump is a crackpot, they resorted to their usual bland circus of reporting “tensions” in the Trump asylum, as if there actually was a Bolton “policy” or a Trump “policy” on the Middle East.

Having abandoned ink, this is the new kind of journalism, in which reporters must fill their pens with mercury – and write.

Off we went again (this from a great western news agency) on the whirligig clichés of Trumpian “foreign policy”. Trump had faced “a cascade of … global challenges” while experiencing “a trying moment … on the world stage”, and Bolton had opposed his president’s desire to talk to “some of the world’s most unsavoury actors”.

After the great North Korean leader, for heaven’s sake, and the deputy Iranian supreme leader and the heroic Taliban, who might Trump want to chat to next? The great Syrian leader, perhaps?

I will leave readers to savour the adjective “unsavoury” – which western experts will never use about Messers al-Sissi (with his 60,000 Egyptian political prisoners) or Mohammad bin Salman (of surgical fame) or various other democrats in Brazil and elsewhere. But the clichés of “stages” and “actors” innocently betrayed what this was all about. Foreign policy doesn’t exist any more in many world capitals. Only the ghostly wreckage of the theatre remains.

Take that infamous Iranian oil tanker which our brave chaps took over off Gibraltar. Released after the Iranians stole a British-flagged tanker off Hormuz, the mysteriously renamed “Adrian Darya 1” sailed off into the sunset, allegedly towards Greece but inevitably towards Syria, where Bolton – in one of his last acts – claimed it was going to off-load its oil at Tartus, where Russia has a naval base. Not bad, but no cigar.

In fact, according to a most trusted Syrian contact (I give my source a 90 per cent accuracy record), the tanker had already shifted half its oil cargo into the Syrian port of Banias (not as romantic as Tartus, but just as efficient) by the time Bolton spoke.

And now, no one cares about the tanker anymore. Trump can hardly bomb the vessel – it would anyway be empty – now that his chief warmonger has himself sunk beneath the waters of the Potomac. And given the Shakespearean comedy being played out in Downing Street’s own lunatic asylum, we can be assured that Her Imperial Majesty’s Royal Navy will not intervene. And that’s the real problem.

Iran knows all about mad leaders and is more than happy for the world – or the “world stage” – to know that it has given oil to its loyal Arab ally in Damascus. And Assad will be more than content for his enemies to know that Iran keeps it word when Syrians are queuing for miles and days at gas stations. So stand by for the next Iranian tanker to steam – without the slightest “let or hindrance” by our chaps, I bet you – past The Rock.

Returning briefly to clichédom, Bolton’s submergence was naturally attributed by my favourite news agency to Trump’s inevitably scrapped plans to chat to the lads from the Taliban, who were to have been imported to the US for a little American hospitality. This, it was said, was – wait for it – “a bridge too far” for Bolton. Why Cornelius Ryan’s fine book on Arnhem (and the equally brilliant epic film of the same World War Two battle) had to be dragged into this was anyone’s guess. But the “bridge too far” was now not at Camp David but in Jerusalem.

And scarcely a paragraph of emotion did it provoke from our Middle East experts – save for the old UN donkey, of course – when Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he would annex virtually all of the occupied Palestinian West Bank to Israeli sovereignty if he wins next week’s Israeli elections.

This would mean that there would never be a Palestinian state – ever. We are, of course, all used to national leaders who threaten to annex other people’s countries for nationalist expansion – but this would be on a scale of colonial plunder quite unimaginable even 10 years ago.

But no more. “This is a historical opportunity...” quoth Netanyahu. Trump, whose infamous “peace plan” is supposed to shower the Palestinians with (Arab) cash after the elimination of their hopes of statehood, said nothing. Nor did our own equivalent nincompoop in London; he was far too busy with his own constitutional tomfoolery to worry about the annihilation of a people’s hopes, let alone their constitution.

This is what happens when madmen take power in democratic countries; little madmen run amok and millions pay the price.

It was somehow appropriate that a Turkish newspaper would attempt to stage a re-run “exclusive” of the butchering of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi – including his “last words”, although they were all publicly reported in an excellent UN document months ago. It was presumably a Turkish government attempt to remind the “world stage” that next month marks the anniversary of the man’s evisceration in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. We’d forgotten we had read it all before.

In other words, the Sultan Erdogan merely wished once more to frighten his Saudi antagonists. This was truly Ottoman.

And strangely, the Sick Man of Europe – as the Russians and then the British once called Turkey for its gradual impotence amid the crazed political and military decisions taken during and after the First World War – has now been replaced by another Sick Man of Europe and another Sick Man in America.

That’s how empires dissolve: when satraps still take their false caliphs seriously, ignore their incurable mental distress, and pay no attention to the outrageous behaviour of their attendant lords. Goodbye to the poor and huddled masses. After that, the bad guys will come along to make fun of them all.