Rob Crilly is a British journalist living in New York. He was The Telegraph's Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent and was previously the East Africa correspondent for The Times of London. The opinions in this article are those of the author.

(CNN) You don't get to where I am in life without understanding the anatomy of a good apology. The idea is to acknowledge any hurt caused, to explain briefly what went wrong, take ownership of that mistake and then -- and only then -- to request forgiveness. It should all be about recipient rather than issuer.

Once you know the rules, it is possible to deploy apologies whether they are needed or not -- disarming everyone from lovers to officers of the law.

This week brought two examples of efforts to right wrongs, both falling miserably short of what might be expected from even a spaniel caught with a lamb chop in its mouth.

The first was what might be called the clarification apology -- a subset of the larger class of non-apology apologies.

"It should have been obvious," said Donald Trump as he tried to back away from denying Russia's hand in the 2016 election, running down US intelligence services and cozying up to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki this week. "I thought it would be obvious, but I would like to clarify just in case it wasn't."

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