On: Trump tells UN he has 'big decision' on whether to 'annihilate' Iran or make...

I have heard men talk of war with gravity, and men talk of it with shame, but today a man stood before the assembly of nations and offered annihilation and a bargain as two dishes on the same bill of fare, to be chosen according to appetite. That is the novelty. Not the threat - threats are as old as the hills - but the ease of it, the waiter’s shrug.

Now, I have spent my life defending fences, so let me ask the necessary question. Why did our civilisation build fences around war - the declaration, the distinction between the soldier and the child, the whole cumbrous ceremony of it? Not from softness. The men who built it had watched cities burn and drawn the only conclusion available to sane people: that the savage thing, left unfenced, does not stay in its field. A statesman who cannot explain that fence is not fit to lean on it, let alone pull it down.

And here is the queer inversion. The man who trumpets annihilation imagines himself the bold one, the breaker of timid conventions. In truth he is the most conservative figure in the hall - conserving the oldest barbarism on record, the prehistoric habit of the tribe with the bigger club. The genuinely radical position, scandalous to every tyrant since Babylon, is the dull one: that a nation of bakers and poets and grumbling taxi-drivers shall be permitted to go on existing.

In the nursery tales we kill the giant because the giant eats children. But a country is not a giant. A country is eighty million children, which is rather the whole point.

A big decision, he calls it. The big decision was made some thousand years ago, by quieter men: that the neighbour shall live. Everything since has been housekeeping.