When Vance asks what America has to gain by risking a war with Russia, Britain, too, will soon begin to ask what is in it for us as part of the proposed peace keeping settlement. When Vance demands that Europe pay more for its own defense, Britain will also want to know why it should shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden for the continent’s defense without recompense. Germany, for all its current economic difficulties, remains far less indebted and much wealthier than Britain. Norway, meanwhile, has spent the past decade growing ever richer as a result of the spike in gas prices. Shouldn’t both of these countries, then, be contributing more in financial terms towards any future British deployment? Finally, when Trump himself complains that Europe is treating the US unfairly while asking for its support, surely it is reasonable to ask why British troops should be sent to defend the EU’s borders when the EU itself refuses to negotiate even the most basic defense “pact” with Britain until it hands over access to its fishing grounds?

At the heart of the Trump-Vance strategy is the pursuit of a new grand bargain in global affairs, in which the US acknowledges the emergence of a new multipolar world governed by great powers rather than international law. While Europe is not — yet — one of those powers, it too faces a moment of reckoning; when the old EU order is no longer enough to govern the continent’s security, new grand bargains will be demanded. It has not gone unnoticed in Downing Street that today, Europe’s security is increasingly dependent on four countries none of which is a member: Britain, Norway, Turkey and, of course, Ukraine. If America’s position in the world is no longer sustainable, then neither is the current concert of Europe. Whether any of Europe’s current leaders can rise to the challenge and create something new is far less clear, although Emmanuel Macron made an effort to do so last night.

In an address to the nation last night, the French President argued that “the future of Europe cannot be decided in Washington or Moscow”. He said that while he wanted to believe that “the US will stand by our side”, Europe had to be ready if that wasn’t the case. “We need to be able to recognize the Russian threat and better defend ourselves in order to deter such attacks. We need to provide ourselves with more arms. We need to do more than we have in the past to reinforce our security.”

In a sense, then, Vance, is both a harbinger of our upheaval — and an author of it. As such, he is a curious character to capture. He is not the Appalachian red-neck of general European disdain; he is far too Ivy League and Silicon Valley to be understood as such. But nor is he merely a tough-talking under-boss of the Dick Cheney variety: Vance is something sharper and more elusive; closer to Richard Nixon than most recent holders of the Vice Presidency. He’s a man of power and ambition who is offensive to European sensibilities not just because of the dishonesty of his casual asides, but the fragility they reveal about our own predicament.

Over the course of the past month alone, Vance has outraged public sentiment across Europe by — in turn — claiming the continent’s attitude to free speech is a greater threat to its security than Russia; condemning the German “fire wall” against the AfD in the run up to its general election; berating Volodymyr Zelensky for daring to question him in the Oval Office; and, finally, claiming that the offer of “20,000 troops from some random country that has not fought a war in 30 or 40 years” was no guarantee of security to Ukraine. Vance’s latest remark, in an interview on Fox News, sparked particular condemnation in Britain and France — the only countries which have publicly offered troops. Britain has spent much of this century fighting — and dying — alongside America. “Have you said thank you once,” has become the meme response, Britain’s diplomatic esprit de l’escalier.

Vance insisted his remarks were not aimed at either country. Yet he quickly added another pointed criticism in its place: “Let’s be direct: there are many countries who are volunteering (privately or publicly) support who have neither the battlefield experience nor the military equipment to do anything meaningful.” This latest criticism is a reminder that the real reason Vance is so offensive is often because he reveals our own weakness. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the painful truth is that the US did not need our support, was not particularly impressed by our efforts, and has concluded subsequently that we have run down our militaries to such an extent it no longer even needs to be polite about the nakedness of our own position.

The interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan remain a trauma for the British body politic, but not for the reason they should — that we lost them both. In the years that have followed these invasions we have agonized over their legality and morality, wisdom and effect, but not so much over our own military failures. Addressing British troops in Iraq in 2003, Blair claimed that not only had they won the battle, but they had “gone on to make something of the country you had liberated”. This, he said, was “a lesson for armed forces everywhere the world over”. Britain was still Greece to America’s Rome. Yet the story was not true, if it ever was.

By the summer of 2007, the Americans had come to the conclusion that in Iraq “the British have basically been defeated in the South”, as the former reservist and diplomat Frank Ledwidge wrote in Losing Small Wars, his account of Britain’s military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. By this point, Blair had ordered a draw down of British troops, leaving the army with a garrison of 500 in Basra under siege from the local militias. The Americans, by contrast, had begun “the surge” under David Patreus to restore order. Still, though, Britain continued to advise the Americans on the way to defeat an insurgency. “It’s insufferable for Christ’s sake,” one senior figure closely involved in US military planning is quoted in Ledwidge’s account. Britain had lost the war — and with it the right to offer advice. Still, we persisted.

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After withdrawing from Iraq, vanquished and dejected, Afghanistan offered an opportunity for us to rebuild our reputation. Around 3,500 troops were deployed to Helmand to restore order and defeat the Taliban. Yet, as Ledwidge writes, such numbers were nowhere near enough. Once Britain’s forces were spread throughout the province — the size of Wales — Britain ended back in the same “self-licking lollipop” position it had found itself in Basra, capable only of defending itself and little more. The capital of Helmand, Lashkar Gah — a city of 200,000 people — ended up being patrolled by about 80 British soldiers, although there were never more than 20 on the ground at any one time. Outside the city, the entire Brigade could only muster 168 combat troops to conduct operations. The result, like Basra, was failure and, eventually, withdrawal.

Has Britain ever properly come to terms with its military defeats in these wars — or those that followed? In Libya, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy led an intervention dependent on the US which turned into another disaster. Is it any wonder that this American administration shows such disregard for the latest Anglo-French initiative?

At the heart of Vance’s complaint is not just a frustration with European capabilities — a long-standing source of annoyance — but a fundamental rejection of what is, at heart, an attempt to extend America’s security guarantee to Ukraine primarily to protect our own security. The US has made clear, repeatedly and explicitly under successive administrations, that it will not fight a war with Russia for Ukraine. Until now it has agreed to pay for Ukraine to fight the Russians, but it has consistently refused to go any further than this. Europe’s attempt to wrestle out of Trump a “backstop” commitment is, in effect, an attempt to change this policy as part of any future peace agreement. Trump has said no.

For Europe, this presents a fundamental dilemma: is it prepared to fight a war with Russia for Ukraine? Today, no one in Europe is prepared to answer that question. For all the talk of “strategic autonomy” or even “independence” from the US in recent weeks, Europe has sought to answer this most existential of questions with a sleight of hand, suggesting that it was willing to fight while seeking to draw the Americans in.

The central reality in European politics today is that there is a panicked scramble to protect the essential bargain of the transatlantic status quo and America’s supremacy in continental affairs, not to seize the moment for its own independence. For sure, the world is changing — more European spending on defense and a willingness to consider the previously unthinkable: that America might one day be a threat to European interests. But at the summit in London on Sunday, while Volodymyr Zelensky was comforted and embraced, he was ordered to make up with the Emperor over the water. Two days later he duly did so.

The paradox of JD Vance is that his insults only matter because we are too weak for them not to — yet if we choose to become strong, we will begin to sound more like him. We are dependent and so we are craven. If we become independent, we will surely ask more from Europe for the commitments we are making. Friedrich Nietzsche warned that when fighting monsters beware becoming a monster yourself. Perhaps, though, this destiny is unavoidable.

Though forgotten by the media in the face of more immediate Middle-Eastern tragedies, a UN mission is attempting to restore order. But such ambitions, reasonable in theory, fundamentally depend on the domestic political situation and whether the government in charge is competent or, as in Libya’s case, broken. Such analysis of Libya as a “failed state” is a longstanding characterisation in the West, and has similarly been revived in recent months as an explanation for the renewed flow of refugees to Europe.

But while blaming this on the breakdown of governance in Libya is a logical first step, we mustn’t stop there. That would be to ignore the roots of the dysfunction, which can be traced to the Nato-led intervention launched on 19 March, 2011. Libya’s state didn’t passively “fail”; the West triggered its failure through its programme of so-called humanitarian interventionism.

This isn’t to say that the description of state failure inside Libya is incorrect. It’s undeniable — indeed at present there isn’t a “state” to speak of. Not only does the country contain two rival governments (one in the capital, Tripoli, the other in Tobruk), but a Gaddafi-era general, Khalifa Haftar, acts autonomously and answers to neither administration, though he nominally backs the one in the east. Beyond him, a multitude of armed militias dominate fragments of the country and thrive by running illicit businesses. Terrorist groups and drug and human trafficking networks add to the mayhem. Outsiders — including Turkey, Russia, Egypt, Syria and the United Arab Emirates — have worsened the turmoil and violence by backing different Libyan clients.

These circumstances have made even the minimally competent governance needed to manage disasters such as Derna impossible. The nation’s infrastructure, especially Derna’s dams, had fallen into a state of disrepair, some of it damaged by the persistent violence. This was no secret: Libyan engineers had long been sounding the alarm. But institutions capable of taking responsibility for such critical tasks have become scarce since Libya’s state disintegrated in 2011.

For 42 years before that event, Muammar Gaddafi, a military officer who toppled the Western-supported monarchy of King Idris in 1969, ruled Libya in a brutal, authoritarian manner. But the country did at least have a central authority capable of policy-making and state action. Everything changed once the sudden shockwaves of the Arab Spring reached Libya and Gaddafi faced a popular uprising, which he promptly sought to crush. But as it gathered strength, clashes between protestors and security forces led to increasing bloodshed, and Western leaders, notably France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain’s prime minister David Cameron, demanded intervention to protect Libyan civilians.

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Within a month of the intervention, some 600,000 people had fled, seeking safety in adjacent countries, most of them migrants from sub-Saharan Africa originally lured to the country by the prospect of finding jobs. But economic desperation soon induced migrants from neighbouring countries — the bulk of them from Niger, Egypt, Sudan and Chad — to head to Libya again, some seeking work, others a passageway out of Africa. It did not take long for Europeans to feel the ripple effects. Though there were refugee flows from Libya to Europe even during Gaddafi’s rule, the country’s coast was more effectively policed because there was a functioning government. Gaddafi also cooperated directly with European leaders to reduce the exodus in exchange for cash: at one point he had demanded €5 billion annually, but in 2010 settled for €50 million over three years. But once the intervention put an end to Gaddafi’s regime and mayhem ensued, migrants from Libya and other African countries started crossing the Mediterranean to Europe in far larger numbers, many in makeshift boats.

Since then, this movement has ebbed and flowed, but never ceased. In March a legislator from Italian PM Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, citing intelligence reports, claimed that nearly 700,000 people are in Libya awaiting the opportunity to get to Europe. Though UN officials dismissed that figure, this much seems certain: whatever the precise number, Libya will remain a launch pad for destitute people eyeing Europe, no matter the EU’s payments to various African countries, and even Libyan militias, to stanch the flow. And the arrival of droves of refugees on Europe’s shores has aggravated the discord within the EU as member states bicker over how the burden ought to be shared. The first refugee crisis peaked in 2015, but it is once again remaking European politics as far-Right parties exploit xenophobic tropes and play upon public anxieties to increase their appeal. Libya’s “state failure” has washed across the Mediterranean and into the countries of the leaders who precipitated it back in 2011.

In seeking a prime mover for the disaster in Derna and the refugee crisis however, we must return to the Nato-led intervention and the mindset that drove it. As I show in my 2016 book, The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, the 2011 uprising in Libya was never as peaceful as was widely reported; nor, as was often alleged, did Gaddafi’s forces train heavy weapons on demonstrators with abandon. Gaddafi’s opponents also exaggerated the number of civilians that were killed by his security forces, as did Western advocates of armed intervention. The frightening estimates of those who were still in danger of being killed ultimately amounted to guesswork. (White House Middle East expert Dennis Ross’s warning that 100,000 people in Benghazi — which then had a population of about 674,000 —  would die was an egregious example.) Likewise, as US intelligence officials subsequently stated, the claim of Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the UN that Gaddafi had distributed Viagra to his troops so that they could commit mass rape lacked evidence.

Still, as the violence in Libya continued, demands for forceful action to stop it intensified, in part because the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P), which offered a plan to stop mass atrocities, was in its heyday. Its principles had even been included in the Outcome Document the UN adopted in 2005, its 50th anniversary. The essence of R2P — elaborated upon in a report from December 2001 — was that state sovereignty was not unconditional. When governments proved demonstrably incapable of fulfilling their basic responsibility to protect their people, or worse were subjecting them to atrocities, the international community was duty-bound to step in, using military force if other means had failed. This was the moral reasoning that led the UN Security Council to pass Resolution 1973 on 17 March, 2011, as Gaddafi’s crackdown continued.

The resolution authorised a military operation — led by Nato but including states outside the alliance — whose remit was to protect Libyan civilians. But the campaign quickly morphed into one that, whether by design or default, overthrew Gaddafi, who was eventually murdered by rebel forces. The power vacuum was soon filled by the anarchy and violence that persists to this day. That denouement was preventable. R2P didn’t merely call for military intervention, as a last resort, to save civilians from harm; it also stressed the importance of establishing order and helping to promote economic recovery thereafter. But the countries that spearheaded the 2011 intervention were not nearly as enthusiastic about the former as they were about the latter. Ironically, one of R2P’s originators later described the intervention as a “textbook case of the R2P norm working exactly as it was supposed to”.

In the event, it proved to be a wrecking ball that shattered the Libyan state and saddled its people with the task of making their broken country whole again. Strikingly, while the major Western powers vigorously called attention to the dangers facing Libyan civilians in 2011, they do not display the same fervour today, never mind that the confirmed deaths in Derna alone far exceed the total for all of Libya in 2011. Nor have the high priests of humanitarian intervention outside officialdom demanded action in Derna or even publicised its plight with the passion they summoned back in 2011.

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Samantha Power, now the head of the US Agency for International Development, then a National Security Council staffer, visited Armenia and Azerbaijan recently to take stock of the refugee crisis that was created by the Azerbaijan’s army conquest of Nagorno Karabakh, the country’s Armenian-majority enclave that declared its independence in 1992. Derna, however, was not on her travel schedule, even though she was among the prominent voices that called for the 2011 humanitarian intervention that left Libya in the disarray that soon earned it the “failed state” moniker. As for the press, after an initial spate of reportage, the coverage of Derna’s suffering has trailed off, even though the miseries of its people are still very much in evidence.

The humanitarian intervention movement, and R2P, its programme, was motivated by a high-minded mission: eliminating or at least mitigating  the persistent, serious harm of mass atrocities committed mainly by governments. Yet the lesson offered by Libya — and Iraq and Afghanistan too — is that deploying military force in other countries in order to stop bloodshed and oppression can unwittingly promote prolonged disorder and violence, upending the lives of the intended beneficiaries. Perhaps Western leaders have learned this lesson. Then again, the hubris produced by overweening power dies hard. Some neoconservatives and liberal internationalists of a markedly millenarian mindset continue to believe that their earlier failures were rooted not in extravagant ambitions but in deficiencies of planning and implementation that can be fixed. As long as this delusion continues, more Libya-like interventions animated by visions of benevolent social engineering await.

Kosovo then was a province in the south of Yugoslavia, a landlocked area slightly smaller than the Falkland Islands. It was officially part of Serbia — the largest of the Yugoslav republics — but was heavily disputed: 90% of the population were Albanian by ethnicity, Muslim by faith. And Kosovo had, for differing reasons, a revered place in the histories of both Serbia and Albania, integral to each’s sense of national identity. As George Orwell noted in 1945: “Yugoslav politics are very complicated and I make no pretence of being an expert on them.”

The Kosovars were a small minority in Yugoslavia, who had long faced discrimination, and long sought independence. That had seemed an implausible hope, but by the time the province came to Blair’s attention, things were looking very different. In the first half of the Nineties, Yugoslavia had been ripped apart, with Slovenia, Macedonia, Croatia and Bosnia splitting to become independent countries, the latter two after wars of a bloodiness not seen in Europe since 1945. The Kosovars were still a minority, but — with Yugoslavia reduced from six constituent republics to just two, Serbia and Montenegro — they now made up a fifth of the country’s population. Not so small anymore.

In 1995, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) began armed actions; by 1998, the insurgency had escalated into serious conflict. The Yugoslav military was attempting to suppress the KLA by terrorising the population: hundreds were killed, thousands raped, and hundreds of thousands displaced. This was the point at which the situation forced itself into the international spotlight, provoking a sense of horrified déjà vu: the earlier Yugoslav Wars had cost the lives of up to 150,000, and made the term “ethnic cleansing” common currency. Many in the West were, retrospectively in some instances, feeling ashamed that such destruction had been allowed to run rampant in Europe. Then, the United Nations had tried to contain the killing with an arms embargo and the deployment of some ineffective peacekeepers; mostly they had looked on sorrowfully. And now it was happening again.

“I saw it as essentially a moral issue,” wrote Blair in his memoirs. There was a humanitarian disaster unfolding, and — as in Ukraine today — the blame lay at the feet of one man: in this case the president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević. Action was needed. By June 1998, Britain was talking with its Nato partners about the possibility of an air and land operation; it was another nine months before, in March 1999, Nato began bombing Yugoslavia. “We have learned from bitter experience not to appease dictators,” explained Blair, who largely drove the initiative. “We tried it 60 years ago.”

There was — again, as today — political consensus, with backing for the government’s actions from the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, then led by William Hague and Paddy Ashdown respectively. Even Blair’s own party was mostly in support. A few on the Left pointed out that the lack of UN authorisation made the bombing entirely illegal, but a motion condemning Nato’s actions was signed by just six of the usual suspects, including Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. Notably absent was Ken Livingstone, who joined Blair in comparing Milošević to Hitler. Robin Cook and Clare Short — who would both later resign from the cabinet over Iraq — were fully on board, the former as foreign secretary, the latter dutifully doing the media rounds to defend the government.

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Television news played its part in preparing the public for military action, with extensive coverage of the appalling suffering being endured by the Kosovars. In the press, the most notable cheerleaders were to be found at the Guardian. As early as April 1998, an editorial was calling for “intervention if only on humanitarian grounds” and for “the deployment of troops”. On the eve of the bombing, the leader column was headlined: “The sad need for force.” We have become familiar with that sense of sorrowful necessity in the last 12 months.

It was confidently predicted that 72 hours of bombing would be sufficient to force Milošević into retreat. That didn’t happen, and the days stretched out into weeks and months. Along the way, there was a series of Nato errors: the accidental strike on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade; a cluster bomb aimed at an airfield that hit a market, killing more than 60 Serbian civilians; the deaths of 87 Kosovar refugees in a bomb attack on the village of Koriša. In the face of these blunders and the absence of a swift victory, Blair ramped up the moral rhetoric: “This is no longer just a military conflict. It is a battle between good and evil; between civilisation and barbarity.” To prove the point, Milošević was indicted for crimes against humanity by a UN tribunal.

But the public was losing faith. Although an early opinion poll showed two-thirds supporting the use of ground troops, the Labour Party’s own focus groups reported far less enthusiasm. At a time when public spending was still under tight control, people wanted to know, why was money being spent on waging war? Philip Gould, Blair’s much-trusted pollster, urged him to ignore the findings and carry on, but press secretary Alastair Campbell was furious with the electorate’s lack of gratitude: “It made you wonder why we bothered sometimes.”

In the event, it took 78 days before Milošević agreed an unconditional withdrawal of Serbian troops, and even then, it was Russian diplomacy and the threat of a Nato land invasion that proved decisive. There was a limit to what bombing alone could do (as Martin McGuinness of the IRA helpfully pointed out). Nonetheless, the operation had achieved its objective. Indeed, it went further. So damaged was Milošević’s standing among Serbs that the following year he lost the presidential election and was dragged from office. (He was subsequently extradited to The Hague to face charges of war crimes, dying before the trial could conclude.) Regime change had not been the war’s aim, but it was achieved.

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Insofar as Kosovo is remembered, it’s seen as, to use Blair’s description, “a just war”. The comparisons between Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany were historically illiterate — and tone-deaf, given the history of the country in the Forties — but there was a clear aggressor, who everyone agreed had to be defeated. It was also, from a British perspective, a clean war. There were around 13,500 dead, most of them civilians, but Nato had no combat fatalities at all. And it was welcomed by those in whose name it was being fought. Hundreds of thousands were displaced, but it was notable that they blamed Milošević, not Nato. The Kosovars were overwhelmingly in favour of the military intervention, and Blair in particular was seen as a hero. When he visited the capital, Pristina, a few weeks after the cessation of hostilities, he was greeted by huge crowds, chanting his name, waving Union Jacks and presenting him with flowers. “Tonibler” and “Bler” became popular names for male children born in Kosovo that year (as with the Kosovan footballer Bler Thaçi).

“War is never civilised,” said Blair in his moment of triumph. “But war can be necessary to uphold civilisation.” It was the kind of paradox that appealed to him and was so integral to his oratory: the civilising war, the imposition of democracy. The victory, he believed, confirmed his “doctrine of international community” — which he outlined during the conflict: those with military power, he argued, had the right, indeed the duty, to intervene where possible against “a despotic, dictatorial regime”, even if there was no “immediate threat to our interests”.

It was the philosophy that later fed his fervour for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and of Iraq in 2003. There was the same talk of good and evil, of how we should never appease dictators; the same predictions of swift success. And in the case of Iraq, there was a similar failure — much more controversially this time — to get UN backing. But by now, Blair was, said Labour’s ex-deputy leader Roy Hattersley, in a “messianic mood”.

Neither of those ventures, of course, ended well. There was no repeat of the welcome in Pristina, and the unforeseen consequences were catastrophic. The destabilising of Iraq led to the emergence of Islamic State; Afghanistan reverted to Taliban control as soon as western troops departed. Nor was Nato’s later bombing of Libya in 2011 any more positive: Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown, but then another, longer and more costly, civil war broke out. All are, by any normal measure, failed states. The Foreign Office currently advises British citizens not to travel to Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya.

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It also advises against all but essential travel to northern Kosovo, and there’s a warning for the whole country: “Terrorists are likely to try to carry out attacks.” Media attention has long since moved on, but even with the continuing presence of KFOR — the Nato-led peacekeeping force, now much reduced in numbers — Kosovo is still not stable. Maybe that was inevitable. In public, this was “a battle between good and evil”. In private, Blair acknowledged that “the KLA were not much better than the Serbs”. The Nato victory was followed by Kosovan retaliation. There was an exodus of Serbs and Roma in a further wave of ethnic cleansing; churches were attacked, just as mosques had once been; and there have been frequent outbreaks of violence over the years: more than 200 KFOR personnel have lost their lives.

There have also been knock-on effects internationally. In 2004, Amnesty International published a report revealing how women were being trafficked into the province from Albania to work as prostitutes, meeting the demands of the 50,000 peacekeeping troops stationed there. And it wasn’t just adult women. “I was forced by the boss to serve international soldiers and police officers,” a 12-year-old Albanian girl told the researchers. Amnesty concluded that the UN and Nato forces were “not only failing to protect the human rights of the women and girls, but are in many cases themselves using them for sexual gratification and are even allegedly involved in trafficking itself”.

By the time the report was released, the sex industry created for KFOR had grown, becoming the centre of a network that sold woman and girls into prostitution in western Europe — 1,400 were being smuggled into Britain every year, it was estimated. When in 2005 ex-cabinet minister Harriet Harman analysed the successful prosecutions for people trafficking, she concluded that, “in nearly every case the culprit was Albanian or Kosovan, some of whom had been allowed in as refugees”.

The legacy of Kosovo was also seen in the transformation of Nato, now an organisation prepared to initiate war beyond the UN: a fact that ensures Kosovo still has traction in Russian propaganda. Answering western criticism of the invasion of Ukraine last year, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov was quick to talk of Nato’s “illegal use of force” in 1999. And, in the context of Ukraine, it’s hard not to see Blair in Pristina as the model for Boris Johnson, or indeed Keir Starmer, in Kyiv. (How envious they must be to see all those Toniblers.) Adoring crowds and moral certainty are a seductive combination, particularly for a politician feeling a lack of honour in his own land.

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Ukraine, of course, is not Kosovo. In one sense, the argument today is even more clear-cut: Ukraine is an independent, sovereign nation, whereas Kosovo had no such status. (Indeed, it is still not recognised by all member states of Nato.) The Yugoslav claim that its forces were suppressing an internal terrorist threat carried some weight; the same is evidently not true of the invasion of Ukraine. The real difference, though, is the nature of the opponent. Blair’s interventionism depended, he said, on answering the question: “Are there military operations we can sensibly and prudently undertake?” Nobody seriously thinks that Nato taking on Russia directly is either sensible or prudent.

Nonetheless, the rhetoric remains, despite all that has happened since Kosovo. The Ukraine War is seen in the moral terms advocated by Blair. Emotion is the order of the day, realpolitik is out of favour, and the political and media consensus is that this is again a fight between good and evil. The danger is of over-simplification. It is not hard to identify an evil, but good is a much less clearcut phenomenon. “War is an imperfect instrument for righting humanitarian distress,” conceded Blair. More than that, it brings unintended consequences, which can amount to evils.

If Blair’s military adventuring had ended with Kosovo, foreign policy would be seen as a minor part of his legacy, rather than the dominant note that it now is. And the Kosovo War would be regarded as a qualified success, the negatives — including the lack of an exit strategy — outweighed by the positives. Few doubted that the cause was just, and most agreed that the violence and the death toll would have been worse had Nato not got involved. It might even be remembered for making the case for Blair’s doctrine of liberal intervention. There was an emergency, a clearly defined solution, and a task that was accomplished. There was also, however, the hazardous, illusory hope that the solution could be replicated in very different circumstances.