I’ve just come back from a short holiday in Venice. The city is an unsurpassable monument to the glories of the Renaissance, but its streets and waterways also bear witness to the absolute non-existence of ‘international rules’.

When confronted by Bonaparte’s expansionist aims in 1797, the millennium-old Venetian republic responded as it had always done, relying on diplomatic assumptions maintained for centuries. Meanwhile Napoleon, promising to be ‘an Attila to the state of Venice’, simply invaded, bringing the Serene Republic to an ignominious end. Venetian art and treasures were plundered to fund the French war effort. In a particular humiliation for the city-state, Bonaparte began filling in the canals to resemble Parisian boulevards. Only the distraction of a continental war prevented him from concreting over the entire medieval waterway system. 

A whole book could be devoted to the lessons the fall of Venice has for modern Britain – a complacent state, run by an out-of-touch elite, reliant on past glories, increasingly shabby and sclerotic internally. However, specifically, I think it’s worth – in the week Donald Trump has promulgated the arrival of the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ – focusing on the lessons this has for a country clinging to an out-of-date approach to foreign policy. 

Britain’s destiny as a 21st-century Venice isn’t set in stone

In this terrifying new world, Britain is stuck playing by a defunct rulebook and, due to a psychosis about empire amongst its governing class, willing itself into acts of monumental self-harm at just the time its presence is most needed. Much of this is justified by the establishment by an appeal to the idea that ‘Britain invented the rules-based order’ and therefore should adhere to it most strictly. The........

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