In 2007, John McCain, then seeking the Republican Party nomination for the United States presidency, sang “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ hit version of Barbara Ann at a campaign event in South Carolina. He also suggested during that era that North Korea should be threatened “with extinction” and that he was happy for US troops to remain in Iraq “for 100 years”.

McCain embraced what his friend William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, labelled “national greatness conservatism”. McCain’s stridency raised questions as to whether his hawkishness would leave even George W Bush, then US president, in the shade.

The maniacal Donald Trump likes to take things to another level with his reality-TV foreign policy, which does not actually merit the description “policy”. His preferred insult in 2017 was to call the Persian Gulf the “Arabian Gulf”. The following year, he announced US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal.

His original idea of “maximum pressure” on Iran has now become one of “epic fury”. In 2019, political scientist Marco Overhaus said: “Trump’s Iran policy looks like a pressure cooker without a release valve.” Now the cooker has exploded.

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