I would like to start by just mentioning the fact that the position that people like myself come from – that is, liberal and military interventionism, in situations of ethnic cleansing, or violence by leaders against their own people – is in a curious position at the moment. It is at the same time both wanting a term and replete with terms. People variously call you a ‘neoconservative’, or an ‘interventionist’, or a ‘liberal interventionist’. Perhaps worst of all, nomenclature-wise, was the brief period when we were referred to as ‘muscular liberals’ – a term which I always found embarrassingly self-aggrandising as well as, broadly-speaking, physically inaccurate.

Whilst not wanting to get stuck on terms of definition for too long, the plenitude and paucity of terms available to us is significant because it accompanies a non-verbal confusion. Because those who come from the neoconservative position have simultaneously won the big argument, and lost it. I hope this doesn’t sound wilfully perverse, but what I mean by this is that, for instance, it is very hard to see a major serious political leader, in either Britain or America, who would outright dismiss the doctrine of humanitarian or military intervention. It has become the mainstream position for all politicians in the UK and US who aspire to the highest political office. Yet at the same time it is something still so controversial that no such leaders will embrace the descriptions that surround their attitudes because they are aware that there is considerable misunderstanding where there is not outright suspicion of such a policy. Before moving on I should just say that I myself have, in one way – my critics might say more – a very simplistic view of foreign affairs. Which is that generally speaking, as with people, you have only two ways in which you can judge a politician or a regime: you judge them by what they say and by what they do. This works perfectly well when judging, for instance, what the Iranian administration is about.

Coming to Mr Obama – it might be a little early to judge him on what he has done. Even I am willing to give him rather more than six months. I never thought he would bring peace to the world within a few weeks, although after his fantastically hyperbolic Berlin speech I think he expected to part the waters by this time. To gauge his impact we need more time. But judging him on what this most oratorical of Presidents says? That is not difficult.

In American and British politics, the so-called realistic ideal that existed pre-9/11 has taken a justified battering in the years since. I think Condoleeza Rice got it right a few years ago, when she was interviewed in Cairo and said of dealing with Middle Eastern despots who oppress their people and allow terrorist entities to ferment in their midst: “Just what is realistic about it”. Although the temptation towards old school realism is still there, and its appeal may yet return during recession, the view has nevertheless taken a justified battering. Just because realism is on the back-foot does not mean that other political temptations are as well.

On the contrary, in the Obama era we see a number of temptations which seem to be growingly strong. Foremost among them is the appeal of institutional trans-nationalism – the idea that internationally, on a grand scale, we can cohere to deal with all the world’s problems. In 1934, in one of his choruses from The Rock T.S. Eliot described socialists as people who spend their days “dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.” On a grand international scale, that seems to be exactly the kind of system that Obama and his advocates are trying to create. You see this in the institutions of the EU and the UN. Yet the failure of these institutions to properly respond to any crisis is actually proclaimed on any given day of any crisis.

Take the example of the EU during the recent economic downturn. In Britain, as in every other EU country, we have for years been preached to by the German and French elites of the EU that its members must subsume their interests before the greater interest of multilateralism and ever-closer union. Yet the minute you get an actual economic crisis like that which started last year, every single country goes unilateral in no seconds flat. The German government’s reaction to the failure of its own car industry is a case in point. If it looks like your car industry is going to collapse you don’t wait for a vote from another European country to allow it not to fail. You just step in and save it. The British people have been lectured for years by German governments on the unquestionable inevitability of multilateralism. Yet when a major part of the German economy looked like it was going to go under that same government went unilateral. This should not be a source of regret or embarrassment for the German – or any other – government. It is simply how politics works and as such it represents the return of a degree of (I shan’t say ‘realism’, but rather) ‘realistic-ness’ to the over-invested-in multilateral bubble.

I also wanted to pick up on what a gentleman said in the previous session, when he referred to why – and this ties in with the internationalist myth – why after 9/11 we didn’t decide to consider the people who carried out this sort of atrocity as simply ‘crooks’. It’s hard to know where to start with this one, but perhaps I could just say that I happen to think a crook is someone who nicks your handbag, and not someone who is a member of an organised terrorist cell, who has a safe haven in other countries and who flies plane-loads of passengers into public buildings. I think there is a distinct difference and I am amazed that many people remain incapable of telling that difference.

A few years ago, just after the Madrid bombings, I was doing a speech at the London School of Economics and in the questions session one of the students very proudly asked me a question with that smirk that you just know means they think the question is going to completely floor you. “Wouldn’t you admit, Mr Murray,” he said, “that you are far more likely to walk out of this building today and be hit by a car, than you are to be killed by a terrorist?” Fortunately it wasn’t too early in the morning and I was quicker on my feet than I often am. So I replied that it was indeed possible that I would be more likely to be run over by a car. But, as I went on to mention, I would also like to know – or if the worst happened would think my family would like to know – after I was run over by this motorised maniac, whether the person who had run me over had been taught to run me over, whether he had been trained by a driving school to run over innocent civilians, whether this driving school was permitted to have a state presence and whether or not he and his fellow trainees were intending to do more of the same.

A combination of a provably failed-policy of multilateralism going hand-in-hand with a suspicion that the enemy we face means that we are witnessing a rush to avoid the questions, debates and policies which we need to be considering. In regards of international terrorism and the future prospects of interventionism post-Iraq, almost all of the pertinent questions are failing to be asked. And so we find ourselves in one of the most dangerous situations of all, which is a situation in which our political leaders, like Mr Obama, talk the talk, but will not walk the walk – a situation in which he talks a grand scheme of interventionism, but will not – perhaps cannot – follow it through.

I give you one particularly notable example from Obama’s fatuous speech in Berlin where the then-candidate said that after the Holocaust, the term “Never Again” must mean something, “particularly in Darfur”. Quite right, his applauding audience clearly thought. But what has he proposed or done about Darfur? What does he mean when he says that “Never again” should mean something, and then allow for it to keep on not meaning anything? This creates a very unfortunate situation between our political classes and the people, where the people hear their leaders talking a great deal about the importance of dealing with issues, and then single-mindedly failing to follow through on their statements.

Francis Fukuyama has been referred to quite a lot this morning. Like many people who agree with the early part of his career, I cite him with caution. But among the many confusions surrounding those who have read little more than the title of his one good book, what is often forgotten or entirely skipped over is that title’s second part. In The End of History and The Last Man, Fukuyama gives what I think is a superlative analysis of what makes up the last man. And in some ways it is impossible not to regard Mr Obama as that second part of Fukuyama’s title, that last man – in the Hegelian sense. Because among other things the last man is entirely unaware of how lucky he is to arrive at the position that he has come to be in – and I don’t mean the presidency. I mean the situation in the world in which he has come to find himself. In Berlin, going back to that hubristic speech, Obama talked about the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. But he talked of it as though that epochal event of the Berlin wall coming down happened by a kind of inevitable force like gravity. As if the Berlin Wall had just been rather badly built by sub-standard Eastern European labourers.

Anyone can do the Obama speech imitation when he speaks in this register, where he hones down tortuously into something else entirely, complex situations which actually only came right because of the individual contributions of often forgotten citizens and frequently forgotten leaders. To hear Obama speak of how the victory against Communist totalitarianism came about you get the strong sense that he believes that if everyone joins hands – when ‘a continent came together’, as he famously put it – ‘a wall came down.’ I simply don’t think that that was how the Berlin wall fell down or how the Cold War ended. It should be noted that his version takes absolutely no account of the military, diplomatic, intelligence and most crucially the political leadership required to bring those events about. It genuinely seems that Mr Obama is under the impression that if we all hold hands and sing ‘Kum-ba-yah my Lord’ world-changing events will simply have to happen.

This is an unfortunate impression to be under as a candidate but as a President it is capable of having serious repercussions. That is, now that he is President his rhetoric of ignorance and optimism will have direct consequences in the world. This is where I would like to get back to Cairo, and specifically Obama’s speech ‘to the Muslim world’ from there a few days ago. Putting many of the unhappiest details of that speech aside, two things in particular stand out. Firstly the extraordinarily misguided act of Iranian-regime-entrenchment that he engaged in when the American President referred to the revolutionary government of Iran in the manner in which it thinks of itself.

The Revolutionary Islamic government of Iran is not the government of the Iranian people, it is a self-appointed and unaccountable revolutionary entity which holds the Iranian people in bondage. This ‘government’ not only does not represent the Iranian people, it does not care what the Iranian people think. To talk to that revolutionary administration in the supine terms in which Obama did in Cairo strikes me as a very considerable mis-step. And then, as if to let the regime off the hook entirely he compares the actions of a few members of the CIA fifty years ago (the toppling of Mosaddeq) with international terrorism now – terrorism which is sponsored by Iran, paid for by Iran, trained by Iran, armed by Iran.

This seems to me to be quite an amazing equivalence to draw. Obama did the same thing with the suppression of women’s rights – perhaps the single most important issue in the Islamic world today and a factor which goes a very long way to explaining why the Islamic world is so retarded in so many ways – not least economically. And yet Obama reduced this great issue of our time to a game of astoundingly silly equivalence, attempting to explain how ‘we’ have a similar fight for women’s rights on as the Islamic world does. To make such a comparison is just appalling, whipping the rug from beneath our reformist women friends in the Muslim world.

I have no doubt that there is some woman in Middle America right now who is finding hard to get on the men’s baseball team at her college, and who will be fighting an exceedingly costly class action law-suit to get on that team. And there will doubtless be some men’s club, some golf club or other in some part of the American continent to which some forthright woman is demanding membership. But it is grotesque to even for a moment compare such a situation with the routine oppression of 50% of the population of numerous Middle Eastern countries. I don’t think that is the same thing – not the same thing at all – and a President who can’t make the call on that one is a President whose judgement concerns me.

Finally I would like to turn to Mr Obama’s attitude towards Israel. Because as troubling as his equivalence between the US and the Islamic world regarding women’s rights was the glaring effort in the Cairo speech at drawing moral equivalence between the Jewish state and its enemies. There is no equivalence between a democratic government which in peace and war aims to minimise casualties and a terrorist entity which devotes itself, in war and peace, to maximising such casualties. There can be no equivalence between a state which seeks and offers peace and an enemy that welcomes and strives for the annihilation of both its enemies and its own people. An American president who pretends otherwise is one who greatly weakens Israeli security and regional security.

I was in Washington recently, at the same time that Obama was meeting Prime Minister Netanyahu at the White House. I am told that a message was sent to Netanyahu by the White House a week before that meeting saying that during the meeting the subject of Iran would be off the table – would simply not be discussed. Thankfully as a result, as I understand it, Netanyahu pretty much only talked about Iran. But an American President who thinks that you can sit down with an ally – a friend – and negotiate with that friend, but ignore the fact that there is a genocidal intent aimed at that friend, strikes me as being a somewhat poor friend. Or to put it another way, it leads America into one of the least enviable positions of all – where it shows itself to be a not very good friend and not a very good enemy either.

The ‘address to the Muslim world’ is a signal of Obama’s flawed approach in so many ways. Not least because his attempt to reason with the Muslim world – even if such a single entity existed – is an attempt in many ways doomed to failure. It was Jonathan Swift who said that you cannot reason with someone out of a reason that they were not reasoned into. And whatever his Blair-like belief in his own persuasiveness, even a US President cannot change across the Middle East, by simply reasoning, or looking nice, or playing nice, the extraordinary problems – indeed the mental problems – of that region. A region where poll after poll, shows among other things, that routine belief that anything that happens in the world must be the fault of the Jews. This happens so often with terrorist attacks, that we now see al-Zawahiri and others having to release video messages explaining that “It was us who did the bombing – come on, give us some credit.”

The minds of publics across the Middle East have now been so infused with fever on this matter and others that within the region we are in very large degrees not dealing with politics. This is not political analysis that populations are engaging in here – it is belief in magic: the belief that the Jews or the US are controlling everything in the world. You have to tackle that idea, and you cannot do it by skirting around the facts. You cannot do it by pretending that a refusal to accept responsibility for their own actions, and indeed failures, is endemic and crippling to the region. It seems to me that Mr Obama’s policies so far demonstrate a very concerning direction, which is that he seems to think and demonstrate a belief in optimism as a policy. But optimism is not a policy, any more than hope is a direction.

This belief in optimism as a policy is a replacement for simply recognising things as they are. It is a terrible flaw not to recognise the world as it is. Yet that is exactly what is occurring. I would like to cite a few examples. Just before coming here this morning I saw the news of the ‘re-election’ of Ahmadinejad in Iran. In many ways the result of the election didn’t matter, because it was not an election and because it has absolutely no bearing on the presence of the supreme leader. And I want to dwell on this subject one last time before closing because I think it is the single most significant issue of our time. What the Iranian regime does and what it says are as one. What the regime says is well known. You can always find people who will claim that the words that come out of Ahmadinejad’s mouth are not the words that come out of his mouth. And those same people can often also be relied upon to say that in any case it wouldn’t matter because Ahmadinejad doesn’t have the real power. Which is of course a false consolation, because the supreme leader says exactly the same things as Ahmadinejad in relation to the wiping out of UN member states and the acquisition of a nuclear arsenal.

The same applies with Rasfanjani, the so called moderate, who also says exactly the same things in relation to Israel and the West as Ahmadinejad. Figures like Mousavi and Rasfanjani have to be watched out for here because our Western press routinuely refers to them and others of their kind as ‘moderates’. What this label tends to mean is that they are fiscal moderates – economic moderates. Which might be great if you are a stall-holder in downtown Tehran, but isn’t particularly great if you are a stall-holder in down-town Tel-Aviv. The regime which Obama spoke to in such supine terms the other day is currently trying to do everything it can in its current capacity – via Hamas and Hezbollah – to do what it has repeatedly stated that it dreams of in its future capacity – as a nuclear entity. And in the last few days the trans-national or internationalist ideal that we can deal with all our big problems, like Iran, if we get together at the UN, or at six-party talks, has once again been shown to be false. When North Korea let off a nuclear weapon, test-launched delivery missiles and then announced that its treaties with the South no longer held, we had the pathetic sight of the British ambassador scuttling of to the UN and talking about teaching North Korea a lesson by imposing tougher sanctions on them.

It seems to me that sanctions against North Korea are already pretty tough. But what this all is a reminder of is simply how the situation with Iran will play out in this world-order. Not too far away from now we will wake up one morning and learn that Iran has tested its nuke, fired off some of its missiles and is now stating that it believes it has the right to act in a manner more fitting to its newly acquired power status. At that point all bets will be off. And at that same point, doubtless, our leaders will take us scuttling back off to the UN. Too late. The same will be the case as with Darfur. Too late. You said you would intervene, you said that you would never let “never again” mean nothing. We went down the UN route of stalling and stalling, and inaction after inaction and as a result there aren’t many people left to kill. Obama may be a hopeless optimist, but the results of this will be enough to drive any observer to the wildest pessimism.

Over the next four years we see the likely possibility of the fall of Pakistan to the extremists who are currently making such successful incursions into that nuclear state’s territory. And secondly, we see the likely nuclearisation of Iran. Whilst the former is terrifying enough, the latter is I believe the single most dangerous crossroads of our lifetimes – the turning point in our lifetimes, when not only Iran becomes a nuclear power, but every single other power in the region goes nuclear in reaction. If Iran goes nuclear we will then see the nuclearisation across the board of the most dangerous region of the world, with what the journalist Tom Gross has described as a ‘Mexican stand-off’ occurring, where everyone has multiple guns pointing every which way in the middle of the town and no one knows, once the firing starts, who started it, or why.

In the UK, David Cameron remains under the belief that he will be a domestic policy Prime Minister. Tony Blair was under the same delusion when he entered office and of course became very distinctly a foreign policy Prime-Minister. Early on Blair said that he wanted to make his policy priorities “education, education, education”. Cameron foolishly tried to beat him at this a few years ago at party conference, when he announced “I can do mine in three letters: N H S.” My reaction was – what is this? If you can sum up your policy in one letter do you win? I don’t know. But the statement seemed to me, as with Blair, emblematic of the fact that Mr Cameron thinks he will come into office and make his priority the attempt to make the NHS a successful enterprise – rather than something which organises the hospitals you would least like to die in or rather most likely to die in, where you go in with a twisted ankle and come out in a coffin. He genuinely seems to be under the impression that the world will look after itself, or at least won’t need his attention.

Referring to Fukuyama’s first book earlier I mentioned that there were two sides to the title – the end of history and the last man. The end of history, is perhaps the most misunderstood concept, spun around in international affairs, and certainly publicly is thought to mean something very different to what it really is. The last man part, where it has been noticed, has been just as equally misunderstood. In the sense that Fukuyama intended, the end of history did occur when he said it did, in that liberal democracy did indeed triumph. But it only triumphed for a time. That victory has fallen away, in some ways for precisely the reasons that Fukuyama said it might do at the very end of his work. Because the last man who enjoys living at the end of history doesn’t know how he got there and doesn’t know how to recognise the threats to that way of life when they emerge. He thinks that he – and his world – will last forever.

In a sense then, I fear that Obama and Cameron may well show us that we are living at the end of the end of history in both the real and popular understandings of that term. They might well also show us that they are last men. And we must hope that the worst they do is prove that be the case only in the Hegelian sense and not the literal one.