So, the wheels are about to come off the world’s economy, wrecked by a man who’s ridden the gravy train for so long that he believes that the buffers are there in an advisory capacity, rather than a safeguard and thus the economies hit them with an inevitable sickening thud, but that’s what happens when you surround yourself with yes men.

Anyone with an iota of a brain would have seen that attacking Iran with no real plan, or worse still, any real grasp on reality or the realities of war, was playing with fire. And just because you can say you’re fired on a reality TV show does not make you a commander-in-chief.

Thus, the world’s greatest military power is rendered as impotent as a eunuch at a Roman orgy, all because the idiot-in-chief could not grasp this simple fact.

It’s all very well having all the weapons systems in the world, but if they are the wrong weapons, it’s like having the right answer to the wrong question. Questions Iran has been asking itself for years.

I guarantee that Iran’s military has been wargaming this scenario for years, while I’ll wager that Trump didn’t even sketch out his plan on the back of a McDonald’s napkin.

The results are all too plain for all to see, and while Trump rages at his past allies, calling them cowards for not sending ships into the Strait of Hormuz, there is a simple reason why they have not. What was once politically acceptable is no longer so.

While once it was fine to send Tommy Atkins, if only it were Tommy Robinson, over the top and into oblivion and history, in today’s zero-accountability body count wars, sending a carrier group into that constrained space would be like shooting fish in a barrel.

For a multi-billion dollar Carrier Strike Group, the Strait of Hormuz isn’t manoeuvre space; it’s a choke point like an elephant stuck in a lift. Iran doesn’t need a matching navy; they only need thousands of smart mines, fast-attack swarming boats, and shore-based anti-ship missiles. It would be a bloodbath.

It is a safe bet that the Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02) is required reading for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as it contains the blueprints for Iran’s current play, where the “Red Team” (simulating a Middle Eastern adversary) used “old-school” tactics such as motorcycle messengers and light boat swarms to effectively “sink” the U.S. fleet in the Persian Gulf.

And let’s not forget that those wargames took place in a virtual world free of the real world and real-time learning of the force multiplier that is the drone. Again, Iran will have been watching and learning from all that training data the Shahed 136 drone has built during its deployment by the Russians in Ukraine. All the while, Trump has learnt nothing.

A dataset trained on blood and sacrifice, and while that is a sacrifice Trump is prepared to make as far as other nations’ sailors and service members are concerned, he knows the sight of hundreds of coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base (AFB) would be political suicide, and that’s one he is not prepared to make.

So, as the US Navy sits waiting for something decisive to do with its toys, Iran brings something else into play, something far more frightening than any weapon in the US arsenal, for it plays on our fears and our psyche.

If you see the ballistic missile attack by the Iranians on Diego Garcia as a failure, perhaps you are missing the point. Alfred Hitchcock knew that no rubber mask or bucket of fake blood could ever be as terrifying as what the audience imagines is lurking behind a closed door.

So by highlighting the attack capability at a range of 4,000 miles, he has brought Europe into the crosshairs and drawn a target on your front door, and the foreign war abstract becomes a home front reality.

And while we will all suffer from higher petrol prices and the domino effect that a lack of supply will have on the cost of living crisis, in the back of our mind now lurks a monster.

When the first V1 or Doodlebug hit London in 1944, it was hushed up as a “gas explosion”, something that could never happen in today’s world of instant news and social media.

After years of the “traditional” Blitz and the birth of the “Blitz spirit”, Londoners had finally begun to feel the end was in sight. And then the “Vengeance” weapons arrived, the V1 and the V2.

In the case of the V1, the terror wasn’t in the explosion, but in the silence after the engine cut out and that “Hitchcockian” pause where everyone on the ground did the mental work of imagining their own death.

The ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ mythology, born in the fires of the Blitz yet today reduced to coffee mugs and posters, hid an inconvenient truth, and while those weapons did not break the spirit of a nation, they came close.

If they could still speak, I’m sure the victims of that war would have something to say about terrors and sacrifice, but they still have a voice in the words of philosopher George Santayana, with his famous 1905 quote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Yet I fear that sentiment would be lost on one Donald J. Trump, a man who so lacks both the intelligence and emotional intelligence to understand them and now seems hellbent on making those same mistakes over and over again. Over and out.