Encapsulating his view of the essence of politics, Vladimir Lenin famously asked “who, whom”, that is to say, what matters in power relationships is who does what to whom. Under the elaborate trappings of abstract, supposedly universal morals, this brutal and obscene maxim has long been the West’s primary operating principle in international affairs.

This week’s Washington-backed Saudi attack on the country of Yemen is a reminder of this cynical practice. Saudi warplanes, supplied with US intelligence data, began bombing Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, in an effort to dislodge the Houthi militias from their positions. A few weeks earlier these militias had ousted Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, Yemen’s puppet president, and seized control not only of the capital, but also of large swathes of the country.

The Saudis and the State Department have justified the intervention on the grounds that the Houthi are supposedly Iranian stooges, and that the removal…