British prime ministers are not used to coming to Ireland cap in hand, and Mr. Johnson left Ireland having achieved nothing. A few days after he had been compared to the son of Zeus, he chose instead to invoke as his hero the Incredible Hulk. Hulk “always escapes,” he reassured the British public. “The madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets.” We Irish could not resist a superior smirk.

Eight centuries after an English king invaded and subdued it, Ireland is no longer the dominated island. Commenting on Mr. Johnson’s September visit in The Irish Times , the author Fintan O’Toole wrote that for the first time since 1171, Ireland is now the more powerful nation. The Brexiteers, he wrote, approach Ireland “through a strange swamp of contradictory impulses: rage and envy, thwarted superiority and indulgent self-pity.”

Not long after leaving Dublin, Mr. Johnson flew off to New York , where he maundered on about Prometheus at the United Nations Summit on Climate Change. While he was there, the British Supreme Court ruled that his suspension of Parliament last month had been illegal, and that he misled the Queen. Since he swaggered into office just over two months ago, Mr. Johnson has lost every vote. He no longer has a majority and his own party is in open rebellion. His attempt to bulldoze through a no-deal exit has so far been thwarted by legislators, who passed a law against it. Nonetheless, he flew back from the United States in full Hulk mode, aggressive, bullish and entirely unapologetic.

Mr. Johnson has tried to use the old British imperial tactic of “divide and conquer,” traipsing around Europe trying to find someone who will break ranks and blame the Irish for the impasse. Instead, the other 27 nations have bonded in solidarity with Ireland and have spoken as one of the need to uphold the Good Friday Agreement, which brought peace to Ireland by, in part, avoiding a hard border. Today, when Mr. Varadkar says “we,” he means we, the European Union.

After months of prevarication and bluster, Mr. Johnson this week presented the European Union with a set of insolently half-baked proposals, describing the question of the border as “essentially a technical discussion.” Mr. Johnson sent an aide to Dublin to brief the Irish government on the plan in advance. “The meeting did not go as well as expected,” according to The Times. Dublin and Brussels were united in expressing both dismay and disappointment. In Northern Ireland, only the Democratic Unionist Party, which props up the beleaguered British government, welcomed the plan.