Pray for calm heads in this Easter of turmoil

AS two billion Christians celebrate the most significant festival in their calendar, this ought to be a weekend to reflect on Easter’s message of rebirth and hope.

Yet this Holy Saturday, the Mail cannot avoid commenting on this terrifying week – perhaps the darkest and most dangerous since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

Over the past nine days, we’ve seen Donald Trump demonstrating America’s vast firepower across the globe – obliterating a Syrian airbase, sending a mighty naval force to North Korea and now exploding the ‘mother of all bombs’ in Afghanistan.

In the process, he has brought about the ‘total breakdown’ of relations between the US and Russia, whose leader he so recently courted, while sending out deeply confusing signals about who America backs in Syria (where each side embraces elements as morally repulsive as the other).

For good measure, he has inflamed the Chinese by publicly humiliating them with threats of trade reprisals if they fail to help him ‘solve the problem’ of the unhinged North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un.

Indeed, this paper finds it hard to recall a time when the rhetoric from world capitals was so intemperate. Washington sprays insults at foreign leaders, Moscow responds in kind, Beijing warns of conflict ‘at any moment’ and Pyongyang says we are on the brink of ‘thermo-nuclear war’.

Where is the calm, level-headed diplomacy for which the world is crying out?

In Mr Trump’s defence, it must be admitted he inherited problems allowed to fester under his predecessor, whose foreign policy was frankly a catastrophe.

Though highly praised for his soaring oratory, Barack Obama did nothing when chemical weapons were deployed in Syria in 2013, just months after he’d laid down a ‘red line’ against their use.

Giving further cheer to the West’s enemies, he withdrew US troops from Iraq, leaving a vacuum Islamic State was quick to fill.

In his eight years in the White House, he failed even to keep his promise to close down Guantanamo Bay – perhaps the world’s most effective recruiting sergeant for Islamist terrorism (though the new president’s mega-bombs may prove equally successful at inspiring terrorists).

Certainly, by attacking Syria’s Shayrat airfield, Mr Trump has proved he won’t tolerate chemical weaponry. But why unleash those 59 Cruise missiles before any firm evidence that Bashar al-Assad was behind the sarin attack?

And how can it be wise to alienate Russia, at the very moment Vladimir Putin was winning grudging plaudits for starting to bring order to Syria? Won’t the airfield attack only prolong this hellish war?

Has Mr Trump learned nothing from the bloodshed and misery left by Western interventions in Iraq and Libya?

As for North Korea, yes, he may fairly argue he couldn’t stand by while a deranged dictator developed nuclear missiles to threaten the US.

But why did he also feel it necessary to insult the Chinese? Wouldn’t quiet diplomacy have secured their help far more effectively than any brash tweet?

It’s a lesson Boris Johnson should have learned before swaggering to the G7, demanding sanctions against Russia.

True, it’s in our national interest to support America. But when others rejected Mr Johnson’s sanctions, he left the UK isolated – and the West vulnerably divided.

And how bitterly ironic that, in the week Mr Trump changed his mind (yet again), saying he believed in Nato, EU countries thought more about their dependence on Russian gas than loyalty to their allies.

What the world’s politicians need is a crash course in diplomacy, calmness and common sense. As for the rest of us, all we can do this Easter is pray for great leadership – something worryingly lacking over these tense days.