In the second place, as Obama’s example shows, today the implied audience for any given speech can be assumed to be multiple: you are speaking to (or at least will be overheard by) not only your own people but also to the enemy and a wide number of interested parties, including the “international community”. With Nato, you will never lose it again.” Compare Churchill, who vowed to rescue “mankind from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny which has ever darkened and stained the pages of history”. But what he actually said was: “We’ll be here for Estonia.

Recently, President Obama made clear that a Russian incursion into any of the Baltic states, which are members of Nato, would result in a declaration of war. For politicians – mindful of legal and constitutional pitfalls, let alone public relations – “military action” is as close as they tend to get.

In the first place the word “war” itself is very often off the table. That has implications for the way in which the rhetoric of war works. Our wars now, like our politics, are more tangled our means of communication both further-reaching and more plural. You may sprinkle your sceptical inverted commas through that list according to taste. The wars we fight now are interventions, proxy engagements, counterinsurgencies, peacekeeping missions, police actions, asymmetric engagements and hybrid wars. The old model had nation-states facing off with standing armies of uniformed professionals. From the second half of the past century onwards, the sorts of war we have been fighting have changed. But if that’s an old story, it bears asking whether there are new ones.

Rj yeatman