YOU read it here first. I wrote last week: “The West doesn’t do foreign policy. Obama makes slick speeches and Cameron operates PR stunts.”

Now it’s official. At the end of last week, Obama announced to the White House press corps that he was to call an important conference. After making a speech, he was asked what his strategy is to cope with the murderous psychopaths in Islamic State. He said, “I don’t have a strategy.” God help us!

Here is what remains of the civilised world under dire threat of Islamic insurgency and the leader of the West calls a press conference to say that he doesn’t have a policy. Meanwhile, Cameron – the heir of Blair – puts us all on “severe” terrorist alert. What does this mean? That he will deploy the Army and the RAF? Intern jihadist suspects? Of course not. He is thinking, as he said, along the lines of making passport regulations more stringent. Does he really think that these savages care a hoot about passports? In any case, border controls are so lax – on the government’s own admission – that we have no idea of how many are coming in and going out of the country.

Meanwhile, the KGB thug on steroids, Vladimir Putin, invades eastern Ukraine and invoking the Nazi attack on the USSR in 1941. For us in the West, this was part of the Second World War. But for the Russians it was much bigger than that: they always refer to it as “the great patriotic war.”

So, by appealing to that memory, Putin encourages his people to a similar military response. And again the West’s response?

Shuffling bits of paper. The EU will call a meeting. Angela Merkel will sulk. Sanctions are threatened. Putin will only smile and shrug. On all fronts, our predicament cannot be overstated. The West is in great peril, the like of which most of us have not seen in our lifetimes. And our enemies – whether in the aspiring Caliphate that is Islamic State or in the resurgent belligerence of Putin’s Russia – have taken note of our declared unwillingness to use force. And so they feel free to take liberties – and just look how they are taking them.

After all our tortuous experience in the 1930s when quislings and traitors such as Butler and Halifax urged accommodation with the Nazis – a policy which the disgusting Rab Butler persevered with even after the Battle of Britain and the Blitz – you would think we might have learnt that letting a ferocious enemy know you have no intention of resisting is a fatal prescription.

A senior German general admitted when the war was over that if a single French battalion had opposed Hitler’s incursion of the Sudetenland, the Nazis would have backed off. The French, with an army of three quarters of a million men just down the road, did nothing. And, of course, Hitler took this for encouragement. There was one man who perceived the reality behind the appeasers’ slogans, and that was Winston Churchill.

But where is our Churchill today among the political pygmies who misgovern us?

NATO is to meet this week in Cardiff. It is unlikely that this great alliance which once held off the power of the Soviet Union will do much more than rustle a few more sheets of paper and tell our enemies that, of course, we have no intention of making armed resistance.

With friends like these, who needs enemies?