Article content continued

Throughout the political classes of the G7 countries — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States — there is enough cowardice and shame to go around, across the spectrum from left to right, that the straightforward reason why this catastrophe has unfolded is rarely mentioned out loud: Assad has taken our measure and his calculations have been right on the mark. He’s not alone. It started with the clever and swaggering Barack Obama, but every tyrant in the world has now had the benefit of a good long look at the Donald Trumps, the Theresa Mays, the Justin Trudeaus and the Angela Merkels, and they have reached a perfectly sensible conclusion. All of our talk about the inviolability of the liberal democratic order, the superiority of Western values, the strength of our resolve and the bright horizon of universal human rights, gender equality, and democracy — we don’t mean what we say.

Photo by Andrew Matthews/PA

Vladimir Putin knows it’s well worth the risk of committing something approaching an act of war with the United Kingdom by resorting to Novichok, a nerve agent far deadlier than sarin or VX, in the attempted murder of the former Russian spy Sergei V. Skripal last week in the Wiltshire village of Salisbury. Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found catatonic on a park bench on March 4. Prime Minister Theresa May sternly warned that her government would not put up with this sort of thing and gave the Kremlin until the end of the day Tuesday to explain away what British intelligence agencies concluded was a Russian job of some kind. You could watch the sneer curling on Putin’s face. The deadline came and went. After some back and forth, May announced a series of measures. A gaggle of Russian diplomats are to be sent back to Moscow. A zero-tolerance policy on Russian meddling. Grave-sounding references to a possibly cool turn in regards to all the Russian money sloshing around London’s property market, and British ministers and royals will find better things to do than attend this summer’s soccer World Cup in Russia.