As Britain prepares to host the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow next month, it is pursuing two contradictory policies that undermine its chances of success. On the one hand, it is seeking a unified global response to the climate crisis with nations agreeing to targets for the reduction of their coal and petroleum emissions. But at the same time, it has joined the US in escalating a new cold war directed at confronting China and Russia at every turn.

The two policies have polar opposite objectives in trying to persuade China, responsible for 27 per cent of global carbon emissions, to cut back on building new coal-fuelled power stations, but at the same time demonising China as a pariah state with whom political, commercial and intellectual contacts should be as limited as possible.

In practice, this means deciding which threat is the greatest. Is it the reported thawing of the permafrost that covers 65 per cent of Russia that could release toxic quantities of methane gas? Or is it Vladimir Putin’s annexation of the Crimea, support for insurgents in eastern Ukraine, military intervention in Syria and building a Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Russia and Germany?

Is the risk stemming from China’s claim to the Spratly Islands, and the possibility that it might invade Taiwan, greater than that posed by Beijing building hundreds more coal power stations under its next five year plan – and thereby making the planet less habitable?

Viewed like this the balance of risks is weighted decisively towards giving priority to limiting climate change when comparing it to more traditional security threats originating in state competition. Put it another way, the greatest menace to the west is not the unlikely prospect of president Xi Jinping invading Taiwan or Putin doing the same in Ukraine, but the disappearance of ice in the Arctic bringing about a global sea rise.

Anatol Lieven caustically points out in his ground-breaking book, Climate Change and the Nation State, that the tension between the US and China over the Chinese fortification of reefs and sandbanks in the South China Sea may be ended, if the two nations fail to limit climate change, not by military conflict but by rising sea levels and typhoons that “put the sources of these tensions under water again�.

It should be obvious that the degree of cooperation essential to stall and, if possible, reverse the warming of the world’s atmosphere will be impossible in the context of an escalating cold war between the leading nations. Unfortunately, the two issues of the climate crisis and a revived cold war remain separate in the minds of both political elites and the public, a self-destructive blindness that is driven by diverse but powerful forces.

These include the difficulty people in general have in taking on board that mega-disasters, of a kind which they previously have had no experience of, may happen to them. A recent example of this was the calamitous delay in Europe and the US in 2020 in understanding the seriousness of the coronavirus epidemic and that it would not be confined to east Asia.

The most dreaded consequences of the climate crisis are still in the future, even if there may be signs of disasters to come in the wildfires in Australia and California and the increasing desertification of countries in the Middle East and North Africa from Iraq to Chad. People may speak of making sacrifices for their grandchildren and for future generations, but they seldom expect to do so in practice. “Do it for posterity,� urges the old joke often attributed to Groucho Marx, but in fact much older. “But what has posterity every done for me?� comes the reply.

People may worry about the climate crisis, but this does not mean that they are willingly assent to higher fuel taxes. Political leaders in both democratic and authoritarian states understand that people do not like governments of any stripe which preside over a reduction in their standard of living, unless they are frightened by a great threat like a war or a pandemic, and possibly not even then.

At the government level, another strong impulse is simply that the political, bureaucratic and military powers feel comfortable in the cold war world of great power confrontation. It was this confrontation that gave them huge influence and vast budgets during the original Cold War against Communism and the Soviet Union, and there is no reason it should not do so again. “This helps explain the enthusiasm with which western security elites have embraced the idea of a new cold war against Russia and China – an analogy that is both largely false and wholly unnecessary,� writes Lieven.

To point this out is not a defence of the authoritarian nationalist regimes in Moscow and Beijing, or, more specifically, of Putin’s repression of his critics and fixed elections or of Xi Jinping’s persecution of the Uyghurs and jailing of opponents in Hong Kong.

In terms of realpolitik, Russia and China are smaller players than they are portrayed by themselves or by their enemies. Russia may still be a nuclear superpower, but in Europe it is territorially weaker than at any time since the 17th century. China may have the world’s second largest economy, but to pretend that it now has the world’s biggest navy by counting every patrol boat in coastal waters is misleading threat-inflation.

America’s fixation on China as a rival is shared by Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but it has an additional input. Hostility to China is a bi-partisan issue in Congress, about the only serious one on which Republicans and Democrats are agreed. This is very different from the vaccine campaign and other anti-Covid measures that have produced only rancorous division. In such a bifurcated political scene, it is not surprising that an embattled Biden is boosting China as the enemy at the gate and calling for Americans to rally around the flag with some expectation that they will do so.

Belief and disbelief in the climate crisis is one of the most envenomed dividing lines in American politics. Conviction that it is not happening or is grossly exaggerated has become part of Republican identity. The hundred or so world leaders gathered in Glasgow in November will know this and that the shaky Democratic control of Congress may soon end, stymying any further climate control measures, so why should they do what America cannot or will not do? They know also that Trump, or a Republican sharing his opinions, could well be back in the White House in 2024.

An international jamboree like Cop26 will be full of rhetorical appeals for global action and solidarity. As during the pandemic, real action, if it happens at all, will be by nation states acting in their own interests. Despite all the apocalyptic predictions of climate catastrophe, the moment when these countries really believe that they face an existential threat has yet to arrive.

The singer Justin Bieber is promoting pre-rolled cannabis joints that he calls “Peaches�, the name of a song from an album. He is doing so in association with a Los Angeles-based company, Palms Partners, that specialises in selling seven-joint packs for $32 (£24) in California and Nevada. “I’m a fan of Palms and what they are doing by making cannabis approachable and helping to destigmatise it – especially for the many people who find it helpful for their mental health,� he says.

Bieber is one of a strange coalition seeking to legitimise cannabis (marijuana) for its health-giving properties or because they believe that criminalisation has failed and proved counter-productive. Online advertising for recreational cannabis in the US claims that it is an antidote for depression. Amazon, the largest delivery company in the world, is reportedly lobbying in Washington for marijuana’s legalisation at the federal level.

In Britain, the former Conservative Party leader William Hague argues in a newspaper column for a move “from seeing drug use as a criminal issue to a health issue, achieving a crucial change in culture�. He praises Portugal for reclassifying as a misdemeanour the possession and purchase of drugs for individual consumption.

Legalising and commercialising cannabis is well under way from Uruguay to Canada and in at least 10 states in the US. Paradoxically, this shift towards the toleration of cannabis as more or less harmless is taking place just as scientists conclusively prove the link between cannabis and psychosis (a less shocking word than “madness� or “insanity�, but the meaning is the same). Cause and effect is today as well established as it is between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.

“Numerous prospective studies have shown that cannabis use carries an increased risk of later schizophrenic-like psychosis,� says an article by Sir Robin Murray of the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London and Wayne Hall of the National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research at the University of Queensland. They cite a study showing that, though Portugal is held up as a pioneer in dealing with drugs, the rate of hospitalisation for psychotic disorders has increased 29-fold since decriminalisation 15 years ago. Another study calculates that between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of new cases of psychosis in London and Amsterdam would not have occurred if the individual affected had not been smoking high-potency cannabis.

Personal observation confirms this: doctors in mental hospitals have told me that they scarcely bother anymore to ask patients if they have taken cannabis, but simply assume it is the case. The situation has deteriorated as the proportion of THC, the psychoactive substance in cannabis producing the “high�, has risen precipitately. Once as low as 3 per cent, it has risen to 10 to 15 per cent in Europe and North America, though in Colorado, the first state to legalise recreational use, the THC can reach as high as 70 per cent. Those taking cannabis daily, particularly if they are young, face an escalating risk of permanent mental breakdown.

But if cannabis has already had its “tobacco moment�, when the damage it does is scientifically proven, why do celebrities like Justin Bieber want to destigmatise it and persuade consumers that it will improve their mental health?

Part of the boosterism in favour of cannabis plugs into its old association with a bohemian lifestyle and “the swinging Sixties�. But it is commercial pressure that is becoming far more important in lobbying for its legalisation. Businesses see they can make money out of it: projected legal sales of cannabis will be worth $66.3bn by 2025, according to a report. Big profits will pay for advertising and lobbying campaigns lauding the drug’s virtues and seeking to put in doubt or divert attention from the harm it causes.

The cigarette industry did this a century ago, funding “independent� experts who sought to blur or discredit evidence that smoking caused cancer. Governments were seduced by high tax revenues from tobacco sales and reluctant to do anything to curtail them. Hollywood stars such as John Wayne, Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy happily – and profitably – glamourised cigarettes, much as is happening to cannabis now.

Businesses seeking to emulate the tobacco companies at the height of their profitability have formed a bizarre de facto alliance with liberals and progressives, who are appalled by the disastrous mess created by government drug policy. The so-called “war on drugs� has demonstrably inflicted more misery in the US, certainly on the black community, than real military conflicts.

But an overreaction to government failure, provoking a dash in the opposite direction, has equal dangers. Those in favour of greater tolerance towards drugs are almost invariably thinking of cannabis as much less nasty than heroin and cocaine. But I have met psychiatrists, with long experience of dealing with drug victims of all sorts, who believe that cannabis is more dangerous than the other drugs because it has the potential to damage many more people.

About 3 million people take illicit drugs in England and Wales, of whom about 2.5 million consume cannabis, some 10 per cent on a daily basis in 2017-18, according to the review of drugs report by Dame Carol Black. Much of the cannabis is produced in the UK, sometimes by Vietnamese organised crime groups using slave labour. Most of the violence provoked by drugs is between the gangs who control the heroin and crack cocaine markets, which are worth about £5bn a year. Decriminalising drugs, notably cannabis, will not affect this sort of battle for territory and market share. Supply lines are very different between the different drug markets, with the heroin from Afghanistan wholesaled by Turkish and Pakistani gangs, and cocaine from Latin America controlled by Albanians.

The legalisation of cannabis will do nothing to hurt organised crime groups, but it will make the drug much more widely available. The idea by proponents of legalisation that the government will tightly regulate its quality and sale is naive. If the authorities cannot control it when it is illegal, they will be even less able to do so when it is legal. But legalisation – and even limited decriminalisation – will send a message that taking cannabis is a benign activity and does not do you or anybody else much harm. The deterrent effect of illegality will evaporate and the drug becomes no different than alcohol and tobacco.

Once commercially available, all the old persuasive tools formerly used by the cigarette industry swing into action as is happening unstoppably in the US. Celebrities like Justin Bieber will “destigmatise� the drug and give it the gloss of youth and fashion. Once, the victims of the tobacco companies coughed up their lungs unnoticed by the wider community, and this time round the victims of cannabis will disappear into mental hospitals without anybody taking much notice.

Three years ago, on 2 October 2018, a team of Saudi officials murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The purpose of the killing was to silence Khashoggi and to frighten critics of the Saudi regime by showing that it would pursue and punish them as though they were agents of a foreign power.

It was revealed this week that a year before the Khashoggi killing in 2017, the CIA had plotted to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who had taken refuge five years earlier in the Ecuador embassy in London. A senior US counter-intelligence official said that plans for the forcible rendition of Assange to the US were discussed “at the highest levels� of the Trump administration. The informant was one of more than 30 US officials – eight of whom confirmed details of the abduction proposal – quoted in a 7,500-word investigation by Yahoo News into the CIA campaign against Assange.

The plan was to “break into the embassy, drag [Assange] out and bring him to where we want�, recalled a former intelligence official. Another informant said that he was briefed about a meeting in the spring of 2017 at which President Trump had asked if the CIA could assassinate Assange and provide “options� about how this could be done. Trump has denied that he did so.

The Trump-appointed head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, said publicly that he would target Assange and WikiLeaks as the equivalent of “a hostile intelligence service�. Apologists for the CIA say that freedom of the press was not under threat because Assange and the WikiLeaks activists were not real journalists. Top intelligence officials intended to decide themselves who is and who is not a journalist, and lobbied the White House to redefine other high-profile journalists as “information brokers�, who were to be targeted as if they were agents of a foreign power.

Among those against whom the CIA reportedly wanted to take action were Glenn Greenwald, a founder of the Intercept magazine and a former Guardian columnist, and Laura Poitras, a documentary film-maker. The arguments for doing so were similar to those employed by the Chinese government for suppressing dissent in Hong Kong, which have been much criticised in the West. Imprisoning journalists as spies has always been the norm in authoritarian countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, while denouncing the free press as unpatriotic is a more recent hallmark of nationalist populist governments that have taken power all over the world.

It is possible to give only a brief precis of the extraordinary story exposed by Yahoo News, but the journalists who wrote it – Zach Dorfman, Sean D Naylor and Michael Isikoff – ought to scoop every journalistic prize. Their disclosures should be of particular interest in Britain because it was in the streets of central London that the CIA was planning an extra-judicial assault on an embassy, the abduction of a foreign national, and his secret rendition to the US, with the alternative option of killing him. These were not the crackpot ideas of low-level intelligence officials, but were reportedly operations that Pompeo and the agency fully intended to carry out.

This riveting and important story based on multiple sources might be expected to attract extensive coverage and widespread editorial comment in the British media, not to mention in parliament. Many newspapers have dutifully carried summaries of the investigation, but there has been no furore. Striking gaps in the coverage include the BBC, which only reported it, so far as I can see, as part of its Somali service. Channel 4, normally so swift to defend freedom of expression, apparently did not mention the story at all.

In the event, the embassy attack never took place, despite the advanced planning. “There was a discussion with the Brits about turning the other cheek or looking the other way when a team of guys went inside and did a rendition,� said a former senior US counter-intelligence official, who added that the British had refused to allow the operation to take place.

But the British government did carry out its own less melodramatic, but more effective measure against Assange, removing him from the embassy on 11 April 2019 after a new Ecuador government had revoked his asylum. He remains in Belmarsh top security prison two-and-a-half years later while the US appeals a judicial decision not to extradite him to the US on the grounds that he would be a suicide risk.

If he were to be extradited, he would face 175 years in prison. It is important, however, to understand, that only five of these would be under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, while the other 170 potential years are under the Espionage Act of 1917, passed during the height of the patriotic war fever as the US entered the First World War.

Only a single minor charge against Assange relates to the WikiLeaks disclosure in 2010 of a trove of US diplomatic cables and army reports relating to the Iraq and Afghan wars. The other 17 charges are to do with labelling normal journalistic investigation as the equivalent of spying.

Pompeo’s determination to conflate journalistic enquiry with espionage has particular relevance in Britain, because the home secretary, Priti Patel, wants to do much the same thing. She proposes updating the Official Secrets Act so that journalists, whistle-blowers and leakers could face sentences of up to 14 years in prison. A consultative paper issued in May titled Legislation to Counter State Threats (Hostile State Activity) redefines espionage as “the covert process of obtaining sensitive confidential information that is not normally publicly available�.

The true reason the scoop about the CIA’s plot to kidnap or kill Assange has been largely ignored or downplayed is rather that he is unfairly shunned as a pariah by all political persuasions: left, right and centre.

To give but two examples, the US government has gone on claiming that the disclosures by WikiLeaks in 2010 put the lives of US agents in danger. Yet the US Army admitted in a court hearing in 2013 that a team of 120 counter-intelligence officers had failed to find a single person in Iraq and Afghanistan who had died because of the disclosures by WikiLeaks. As regards the rape allegations in Sweden, many feel that these alone should deny Assange any claim to be a martyr in the cause of press freedom. Yet the Swedish prosecutor only carried out a “preliminary investigation� and no charges were brought.

Assange is a classic victim of “cancel culture�, so demonised that he can no longer get a hearing, even when a government plots to kidnap or murder him.

Isaiah Berlin once denounced somebody for being “that rare thing – a genuine charlatan�. He pointed out that few people, even quacks and imposters, deceive and manipulate all the time. Boris Johnson is a prime example of Berlin’s rare breed, who does just that with his boosterism, false promises and lying. This is attested to by everybody from newspaper editors like Max Hastings, who knew him during his days as a journalist, to his former chief adviser Dominic Cummings.

For a proportion of the public, the fact that their prime minister is a charlatan (or a mountebank – a useful word that has largely gone out of fashion) is an accepted if regrettable feature of the political landscape. But dismissive contempt and furious hostility both serve to prevent proper analysis of the real-life consequences of having somebody as frivolous as Johnson, along with his lightweight appointees, in charge of the country.

The result is not automatically negative, since their very incapacity may undermine their ability to do real harm. But of course one should not bet on a happy outcome. As Cummings showed, giving chapter and verse, Johnson’s chaotically poor judgement over the Covid-19 pandemic last year led to the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of people.

More often, Johnson escapes criticism because people do not take him seriously but see him as a comic turn. The price to be paid for this tolerance of his antics was on show this week, as Johnson, bursting with servile bonhomie, sat beside President Biden in the White House, claiming that British-American relations were better than ever. Biden, for his part, made it humiliatingly clear that an Anglo-American trade deal was dead in the water, and that the US would resist Johnson’s bid to torpedo the Northern Ireland protocol.

The balance of power between the US and the UK has been weighted heavily towards the Americans since 1940, but Britain’s room for manoeuvre in the wake of Brexit is more minimal than ever. Predictably, the real failure in Washington was masked by the claim that Britain might join the US, Mexico and Canada in the North American free-trade pact, a fantasy trumpeted by the pro-Tory media as a sign that “global Britain� was on the march, though bemused trade experts denied that any such thing was likely to happen, adding that it would do Britain little good even if it did.

Like most political leaders, Johnson is addicted to both giving and attending conferences that are billed as decisive for the fate of the world and forgotten a few months later. Already we have had Johnson in full after-dinner-speaker mode at the G7 summit in Cornwall, and then in front of the UN general assembly this week. He will shortly be performing at the UN climate change conference in Glasgow.

Having attended many of these international jamborees over the years, I still have difficulty remembering any that changed anything for the better (or, indeed, for the worse). Usually, calls for action are in reality a replacement for action. But they are an ideal platform for a government whose meat and drink are catchy slogans and grandiose projects that are discarded after they have served their political purpose.

Such snake-oil remedies to real problems no longer even get a decent burial; they are instead handed over to Michael Gove: secretary of state in charge of “levelling up� and keeping the UK together as a nation state, as well as housing and planning.

I like to imagine Gove’s office diary:

2.30 to 3.15pm – act to level up Britain, more unequal today than any country in the EU aside from Bulgaria; 3.15 to 4pm – do something to hold together the United Kingdom, under greater threat than at any time for a century; 4 to 4.30pm – solve cladding problem; 4.30 to 5pm – resolve housing and planning crises, so damaging to the Tories among their core supporters.

In practice, Gove will be in charge of a giant political care home, where abandoned promises will be on life support, giving the government useful deniability when asked what happened to past pledges.

But this lack of seriousness and generalised ineffectuality is not entirely distressing. The Johnson government felt more menacing when it was directed, at least in part, by Cummings, as the Otto von Bismarck of Downing Street, deploying his ruthlessly authoritarian abilities to get toxic policies implemented.

The Tory party was once famously labelled by Theresa May as the “Nasty Party�, but today a more accurate description would be the “Silly Party�. Of course, Priti Patel as home secretary and Nadine Dorries as minister for culture will delight Tories by fighting high-profile culture wars, but in the UK these are largely media-inspired conflicts. Trivial incidents, such as critical graffiti scrawled on a statue of Winston Churchill, are inflated, framed as an assault on British national identity.

A paradox of the culture wars in Britain is that those waging them in supposed defence of British traditions are adopting wholesale the agenda of the Republican Party in the US, where cultural wars are fought with such venom because they plug into racial animosities. In Britain, attitudes are different, as evidenced by the counterproductive failure of Patel’s attempt to exploit opposition to footballers taking the knee, and more broadly by the Black Lives Matter movement.

More threatening would be cultural wars fought out at an institutional level, such as the appointing of a hard-right head of the communications regulator Ofcom, who would be likely to open the door to partisan television channels, possibly in the shape of Rupert Murdoch’s proposed talkTV.

Some see it as superficial to view Johnson and his government as an unlucky accident in British history, preferring to drill down and detect a new type of toxic English nationalism. They see Brexit as both a symptom and a cause of an embattled English identity under threat from globalisation.

There is something in this, but I am sceptical about the argument, since it does not quite fit the facts. After all, one of the electoral breakthroughs for Ukip was not in England but in Wales. In any case, a strong sense of English identity is scarcely new, though some of its symbols have changed. I have always liked John Betjeman’s poem “In Westminster Abbey�, in which a lady prays at the start of the Second World War:

Think of what our Nation stands for / Books from Boots’ and country lanes / Free speech, free passes, class distinction / Democracy and proper drains.

More aggressive and satirical is Flanders and Swann’s “A Song of Patriotic Prejudice�, first sung in 1956, which is full of abuse of other nations (especially those of the Irish, Scots and Welsh), and is too robust to get a hearing today. Some of the tamer lines run:

The English, the English, the English are best / I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest / The Germans are German, the Russians are red / And the Greeks and Italians eat garlic in bed!

Trumpism was never quite what it seemed to the rest of the world when it came to America’s actions as opposed to his words. The tone was always belligerent, but Trump went out of his way not to start any wars. As for the slogan “America First�, this was not so much about an isolationist US and more about the US acting unilaterally in what Trump saw as its own best interests.

Bidenism is turning out to be not so very different from Trumpism. Joe Biden carried out to the letter Donald Trump’s ruthless deal with the Taliban, agreed in February 2020, to abandon the Afghan government, which had been excluded from negotiations about its fate. European allies of the US learned little about the American pull-out plan from Kabul airport, even as it was under way.

Now Biden has followed up his unilateralism in Afghanistan with his surprise announcing of an agreement for the US, along with Britain, to help Australia build nuclear-powered submarines to deploy against China in the years ahead. By arbitrarily cutting out the French from their $66bn contract to supply diesel-powered submarines, Biden behaved in the true Trump tradition of causing greater outrage to an ally than dismay to a potential enemy.

The response of China to an alliance clearly directed against it was angry, but this was still mild compared to the apoplexy among senior French leaders at their public humiliation. “This brutal, unilateral and unpredictable decision reminds me a lot of what Mr Trump used to do,� said French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian. “I am angry and bitter. This isn’t done between allies. It’s really a stab in the back.�

A betrayal it may have been, but the French showed a certain naivete, as well as poor intelligence, in not seeing that something like this might be on the cards. When it comes to back-stabbing an ally, there was the recent precedent in Afghanistan and, a couple of years back, another ominous pointer when Trump shocked the Saudis, with whom he was so close, when he failed to retaliate against a devastating missile attack on Saudi oil facilities in September 2019 that was clearly orchestrated by Iran.

Gulf monarchies discovered to their extreme alarm that the American protective umbrella, in which they had previously trusted, was not quite what it seemed to be. It turned out not to include going to war on their behalf, a realisation that will have been reinforced by the Afghan shock and is radically reshaping regional politics.

Complaints by those let down by the US – be they in Paris or Riyadh or in wherever the dispersed Afghan government has sought refuge – are common enough in the history of diplomacy. After all, it was President Charles de Gaulle who said that, “treaties are like young girls and roses – they last as long as they last.�

True this piece of realpolitik about the impermanency of relations between nation states may be, but the Australia-UK-US (Aukus) submarine deal – coming after the Kabul rout and the non-defence of Saudi Arabia – gives a sense that tectonic changes are shaking the way the world works. Biden, who was full of “America-is-back� rhetoric at the start of his presidency, is now treating some of his allies as cavalierly as Trump ever did.

The Aukus alliance is just the sort of Anglo-Saxon line-up most likely to infuriate the French and worry the EU. It will energise European states to try to pursue a distinct and less confrontational policy towards China than before. If they fail to do so, and the omens are not good given their impotence in successive crises in the Middle East and the Balkans, then they become even more marginalised.

But rejoicing among Brexiteers that Britain was right to leave a foundering EU vessel are premature, because British reliance on the US is greater than ever. This carries unpredictable risks as well as dubious advantages, as Britain discovered during the Iraq war, which Britain joined as America’s principal foreign military ally in 2003 and spent the following six years trying to escape without offending the Americans. The calamitous method chosen was to send British military forces to Helmand province in Afghanistan, which turned out to be an even deadlier place than Iraq.

Joining the US and Australia in upping the confrontation with China carries similar risks. It is not “a profound strategic shift�, as Boris Johnson claims, since nothing much is going to happen for over a decade. Cold war threat inflation about China having the world’s largest navy is absurd, since ships that are little more than minnows have been counted as part of the Chinese fleet.

But what Britain would do if the new cold warriors are correct in their warnings and China does indeed invade Taiwan? This is an important question for “global� Britain because it means standing tall against even taller opponents like China and Russia in the hope that they show restraint or the US gives unstinting support.

The dependency is risky because American foreign policy is determined by its domestic political agenda, and never more than at present. A motive for Biden trumpeting his new alliance against China is that it projects strength and diverts attention away from the weakness displayed during the chaotic US exit from Kabul. Dominating American TV screens over the last month, the rout sent Biden’s approval rating in the opinion polls spiralling down to 42 per cent and his disapproval rating up to 50 per cent – the first time his ratings have been negative since he took office.

Britain wants to posture as a great power, but has less and less means of doing so, except as a humble spear carrier for the US. Not all this can be blamed on Johnson and his jingoistic flag wavers in government, because they are only taking advantage of a public assumption that Britain possesses levers of power that no longer function.

Dominic Raab may have lost his job as foreign secretary because he lolled too long beside the swimming pool at his luxury hotel in Crete as the Taliban was capturing Kabul. But had Raab hastily returned to London – or drowned in the hotel pool – it would not have made the slightest difference to events in Afghanistan.

Public and media misperception of the real power of the British government gives an air of unreality to much of British political life at home and abroad. Six years ago, debate raged on whether or not Britain should launch bombing raids against Isis in Syria, with all sides ignoring the fact that Britain did not have the planes or the intelligence to do anything significant – something subsequently admitted by the RAF officer in charge.

The pretence that Britain is once again a power in the South China Sea and Pacific can only be achieved by complete reliance on the US, ignoring the lessons of the Iraq and Afghan wars.

Patrick Cockburn’s new book ‘Behind Enemy Lies: War News and Chaos in the Middle East’ will be published by Verso in October