There has been a lot of careless talk about an ‘axis of evil’, but I would like to look at that in a different way. To add a touch of randomness to the proceedings, I will use as my reference a game that was insurgent in its day and that I have played with friends of a similar vintage for more than four decades, Dungeons and Dragons.

Among a great many other virtues, role playing allows the player, and the games master, the story teller, too, to explore and occasionally subvert the idea of good and evil. Good is generally defined in such games as a love of life, truth and beauty, with Evil as its nemesis.

It is easy to discern in the actions of Russia and Iran a disdain for life, but how about Israel, and now the U.S.? More problematic is that, if you ask a member of the Revolutionary Guard of Iran, it will be he who is righteous, doing God’s work. The enemies of the West see in our democracies, weakness, and in our lifestyles, decadence. And to undermine our social and political systems they spread, not so much evil as chaos.

Only now are many saying that they should have paid that feature a bit more attention. In Britain, we elected Boris Johnson to see us through Covid, a time when care, consistency and detail were important. Did we really need a major enquiry to expose weaknesses in that response?

Early editions of my favourite role play game saw the struggle for its imaginary world as between Order and Chaos, with a second conceptual axis of Good versus Evil introduced only later. Necessary, because it is we, the players, who are the iconoclasts, while the game offers then and now the glorious opportunity to be more ‘individual’ than we might hazard in real life.

What joy is there in being a make-believe hero if we cannot diss the rules now and then? Was Robin Hood not both Good and Chaotic? Vlad the Invader, not getting his way in Ukraine, has attempted to destabilise a dozen or more western European nations, very much what he was doing before starting his little local war. Cyber-attacks, drone incursions, election interference are all in his standard repertoire.

Russia is in a parlous state, as I have documented, with Ukraine now moving forward on the battlefield, while destroying Russian military and economic infrastructure at pace, and sending waves of drones to attack Moscow itself.Under attack from a militarily superior opponent, Iran has lashed out. Its aim, seemingly, is to create chaos in the region and the world economy.

Some blame the similarly capricious Trump, a new and unwelcome axis of chaos in the World, but Iran has now shown its true nature. What would such a rogue nation do with an atomic weapon? Israel, first on that block, will never allow it.Rebuffed by Keir Starmer and other leaders, Trump’s petulance is once more apparent. A good result for the world would be a democratic Iran, a defeated Putin and a successfully impeached Trump, but I do not think that I will hold my breath.