I have a confession to make.

Up until this last month, I’ve considered Donald Trump to be narcissistic, sociopathic, and irrational, incapable of self-reflection and any significant depth of thought or understanding, pathologically mendacious, corrupt, and criminally self-seeking, a vile mass of anger, hate, and gross animal appetites – all of these things, yes, but not actually insane.

I’d also thought that, in promoting his own selfish interests, and in pandering to his own bloated ego, he would always eventually, despite all his inflammatory rhetoric, end up playing the role of the pragmatist.

It looks like I couldn't have been more wrong. Because, whatever one’s politics, it is remarkably difficult to imagine how, by taking his nation into what can only be a catastrophic conflict, he can think that he is serving his own interests or America’s.

The few remaining outposts of sanity left in Donald Trump’s brave new world have looked on aghast at these latest appallingly tragic and painfully absurd developments in the history of the Middle East.

The man who promised to sort things out within days of his return to power has only of course succeeded in making absolutely everything infinitely worse.

What can he be thinking of?

And what of those calmer voices in Washington and across the West that had so recently called for restraint, but which are now applauding, exacerbating, and escalating the chaos and the slaughter, or at the very least pretending to turn a blind eye to this apparent act of geopolitical madness?

The British Prime Minister may have warned against what, with typical understatement, he described as the “risk of escalation” and called upon all parties to return to the negotiating table, but he fell well short of condemning this spiraling descent into military madness.

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The leader of the UK’s Liberal Democrats may have expressed concern at this latest show of, as he put it, the “erratic” behavior of the American president, but in the same breath, he demanded an immediate build-up of Britain’s armed forces, which he extraordinarily supposed might be achieved by offering young people a cash payment of £10,000 to sign up – an approach which, coming from those mind-numbingly moderate centrists, might be considered hawkish to the point of the incendiary.

Meanwhile, even the perennially sober Observer newspaper splashed across its front page the ominous headline "Closing in" as it reported that the United States had deployed B-2 bombers – strategic stealth aircraft hailed as "unstoppable" by the Trump-loving GB News.

And the BBC, which once alienated Tony Blair's administration by only thinly veiling its opposition to the illegal invasion of Iraq, seems increasingly muted at a time when it's commonly rumored that it's actively working to appeal to the Far-Right supporters of Reform UK, for fear that they may one day manage to get into government.

The lack of outrage voiced by Western nations that haven't yet fallen to this tide of fascism seems to have similar but more immediate causes: the real fear of retaliatory measures – most likely in the form of further trade tariffs, or worse – from an American administration which seems, in its bullying mob-like tactics, unwilling to tolerate the slightest hints of criticism or dissent, either at home or abroad.

There’s an old (and frequently misattributed) saying that for evil to triumph, it’s only necessary that good people do nothing. And across the world today, we are witnessing scores of our political leaders, most often people of sincere beliefs and good conscience, yet paralyzed by the chilling effect of the White House’s unpredictable but brutal wrath, who are today doing precisely that.

It's not an exaggeration to suggest that this is starting to feel like the end of the world. This isn't just about the much-touted decline and even the demise of the Western model of liberal democracy, as the leader of the so-called 'Free World' cracks down on the free-thinking treacheries of those in public service, media and education who might dare to mutter opposition to his eccentric approaches to government, politics, economics, diplomacy, international relations, military strategy, domestic and transnational law, ethics, expectations of integrity, and the concept of truth itself.

But it's also about the pressingly urgent possibility of actual Armageddon, as reports circulate that Trump's friends in the multinational conglomerates – apparently impatient for the apocalypse promised by climate change – are even now putting in place their contingency plans to continue their operations in some form or other, and to perpetuate their hegemonic powerbases, after the catastrophic collapse of our civilizations, after the obliteration of large portions of the human race – after, that is, the end of the world as we know it.

It's a cliché to say that those of us in the post-industrialized West only ever get truly worried when the comforts and securities that underpin our daily lives are threatened, but it's no less true for the fact that it's a cliché – and today a lot of ordinary people are starting to get very worried indeed.

It might be forgivable to suppose that the power-crazed warmongers have had it coming to them for a long time. We can only, after all, continue for so long to lord it over the planet with increasingly dire impacts before the consequences of our actions come back to smash us a knock-out blow right between the eyes.

But, as we are constantly reminded, it's not the rich and powerful who are at the front line of such catastrophes, and it's all too rarely our warmongering leaders whose lives end up getting destroyed.

This isn't a matter any longer of taking sides in the grand geopolitical and ideological debates that have dominated and defined the history of our species for the last few decades. It's now much simpler than that. It's about choosing to side with sanity and with survival – and surely, although it's not always easy to do so, that's ultimately not too crazy a choice to make.