Donald Trump was clearly at the back of the queue when attention to detail and forward-thinking were handed out.
Never has it been more apparent, exactly a month into the war on Iran, that he embarked on this escapade with minimal planning and no clearly defined exit strategy.
The results have seen the world plunged into a state of previously unknown chaos – and the US President himself left flailing like an ageing prize fighter who just didn’t know when to hang up his gloves.
For all his stream-of-consciousness bravado and bluster, Trump appears more out of his depth with each passing day.
His increasingly erratic pronouncements mean fewer people than ever would be prepared to believe the Lord’s Prayer out of his mouth.
Unless extending the deadline for a deal with Iran turns out to be a smokescreen to allow the deployment of thousands of extra American troops to the region, the President’s behaviour over the past week has been that of a desperate man.
And with good reason. It is now clear that Washington grievously underestimated the Iranians’ resilience before launching an offensive against them.
Just as with previous conflicts in Vietnam and Afghanistan, the prospect of US troops slinking back home with nothing to show for their efforts is a very real one.
Pictured: Donald Trump speaks at an event celebrating farmers and Agriculture Day on the South Lawn of the White House on March 27, 2026
Nothing we have seen so far, in fact, suggests that the Tehran regime is even particularly fazed by the US onslaught – although that may be at least partly explained by the moral and practical support it is receiving from Russia and China.
That the Kremlin is understood to be supplying turbojet-powered Shahed drones to Iran is notable enough in terms of these hostilities.
But with Putin’s war against Ukraine now in its fifth year, it also feeds into a growing sense that we are moving towards a very different world.
Increasingly, it feels as if these individual conflicts are each part of a bigger picture that is ultimately about Western democracy versus the regimes run by despots and autocrats.
It also seems likely that whatever unfolds in the warzones over the coming months and years will shape international relations and the geopolitical arena for decades to come.
At home, there is no escaping the fact that it has been a dispiriting week for everyone who loves Britain.
It is bad enough that the knock-on effects of the war will hit us all in the pocket in the form of higher fuel prices, rising food bills and heftier mortgage repayments.
But it is profoundly depressing that the economy is so fragile under Keir Starmer’s socialist administration that it is grievously unprepared for any sort of global turmoil.
That is the only logical conclusion to be drawn from the latest forecast by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which found that Britain faces being hit harder than any other G20 nation because our position was already ‘relatively weak’ before the war started.
Worse still in the current climate, though, is the Government’s complete lack of interest in the Armed Forces.
Our vastly diminished military strength has been exposed for all the world to see in the past four weeks, not least when the Royal Navy had to endure the humiliation of asking to borrow a warship from Germany.
With civilisation teetering on the brink of a third world war, Sir Keir should hang his head in shame for leaving Britain with no say, no voice and no political clout on the international stage.
