We are long past the point where any rational person expects the European Union to oppose Donald Trump’s war on Iran on such quixotic grounds as values, morality or law. What’s baffling, though, is the EU’s failure to protect its own naked self-interest. It is sleepwalking into an existential crisis.

Obviously, the primary victims of this war are the Iranian people, caught as they are between a vile regime in Tehran and a mad one in Washington. Next are the people of Lebanon hunted from their homes by Israeli bombers. After that, the damage is inflicted on the wider Middle East, most notably the Gulf emirates whose mirage of dazed detachment from geography has been so cruelly dispelled.

Beyond these catastrophes, though, there is a less immediate but no less fundamental threat to the EU. The United States can (and sooner or later will) walk away from the wreckage of Trump’s war. It’s what it does: the evacuation of Ho Chi Minh City replays itself in the helter-skelter retreat from Kabul.

This is the great privilege of superpower: you get to outsource consequences. If you make movies about these disasters, they are about the pain of your own vets. The rest is just numbers: hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of deaths and injuries to foreigners that are as forgettable as they are regrettable. As the catchphrase in one military sitcom had it: Oh dear, how sad, never mind!

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