It sometimes feels that we have been struck by an ancient curse: ‘May you live in interesting times.’There is war, certainly, and the sense that several of the participants have scant or no regard for international norms and rules or for the humanity of their opponents. These accusations and potential show trials will haunt Russia and Israel long after the open hostilities have died down.

Then there is Trump. During Covid, when walks in the local park were conducted with caution, I became a regular TV viewer of the government’s press conferences. I soon came to the conclusion that they were only partially about adapting to changing circumstances, but they were also a consequence of the strong affection by the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, for the sound of his own voice.

There was, for example, very little chance that rules would be followed if they changed almost daily. And so it turned out.I get the same sense with POTUS D. Trump. His constant chopping and changing on tariffs is redolent of that earlier blonde bouffant leader, with the bad news being that we have to listen to this self-satisfied posturing for another three years.

Trump has always loved the sound of his own voice and initially enjoyed greatly waving his swagger stick at the world. But reality seems to have a way of coming back to bite him. His bullying of what he sees as lesser nations has had some of the effects he intended, but a lot has gone wrong and his opponents now shout TACO - Trump always chickens out.

Putin seems to agree, hence the recent talk about Russian plans to invade his NATO neighbours, but my analysis, as regular readers know, is that he has always talked strong, but struggled to back it up. You need a competent army for any such escalation, with modern equipment, and the recent overnight loss of one third of his strategic bombers hasn’t helped.

Bullies, famously, are cowards. Trump, it turns out, is not averse to sending in the US air force, but only once someone else has reduced the Iranian defences to rubble. He does properly understand one thing, that military involvement has a habit of turning out in unanticipated ways.

Trump’s long conversations with the Russian president have revealed to the latter his true nature, one of bluff and bluster. Putin is the master of that and is hoping against hope that his threats will get him something, indeed anything out of his ultimately ill-fated adventure in Ukraine.T

rump, never the sharpest pencil in the box, seems belatedly to be discovering what the rest of us already knew, that the Russian president has been stringing him along. Europeans, including the UK, realised early on that we are on our own, so Trump and Putin’s combined attempts to convince us of that tell us nothing that we didn’t already know.

Online, it seems that everyone and his aunt are talking about the imminent collapse of the Russian military, the Russian economy and even the Russian state. While things are certainly headed in that direction, no one really knows how long Putin and his war can last. Nor is it clear whether there is any substance to supportive words from China.

The Donald’s boasts of creating peace in the Middle East have proved just as misjudged as those for Eastern Europe. As in the East, the more he talks overconfidently about peace, the more innocent people die. There is something truly disturbing about reducing millions of wretched lives to a deal for prime real estate.