World leaders, as they like to be called, love a crisis. It relieves the boredom. They dash about, calling summits and UN Security Council emergency sessions. They issue proclamations, threats and dark warnings; they jawbone on hotlines and occasionally dispatch troops or aircraft carrier battle groups.
Hordes of diplomats follow in their slipstream, and behind them comes a circus train of media pundits and think-tank pontiffs. The sound of grinding axes makes the welkin ring. It is very exciting.
Ukraine and Crimea is the latest crisis, rich with dramatic imagery. There are the Ukrainian flags, translucent in the flames on the Maidan in Kiev. Bearded revolutionaries hurl defiance. Tanks roll. ''Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin!'' bellows a flunkey as the master of All Russia strides through a pair of towering doors into his lapdog parliament, the Duma. (Big doors are always a useful measure for despots. The bronze portals to Hitler's Reichskanzlei were almost six metres high).
Putin is clearly a thug in the grand tradition of the madder tsars, or Stalin and Brezhnev, but he has a point about Crimea. Historically, the place has always been Russian. It was only in 1954 that it was handed to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev, who presumably thought that it didn't matter very much because the entire show from Warsaw to Vladivostock was run from the Kremlin anyway.
But, oh, the outrage in the West and beyond. The worst land grab in Europe since the Nazi rape of Czechoslovakia! I cannot imagine how John Kerry kept a straight face when he fulminated against powerful states invading another country uninvited. He did vote for the Iraq War, remember.
Sanctions have been brought down, although their chief effect will be to keep a handful of Russian oligarchs and their pneumatic blonde mistresses from the tennis at Wimbledon this year.
After that Crimea will be forgotten. There'll be a new crisis to entertain us all.
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