What did David Cameron expect when he lectured the Americans?

Lord Cameron, bless him, is back striding the world stage. He wrote an article last week in Washington’s inside-beltway website the Hill, urging Congress to vote for more aid for Ukraine. The Foreign Secretary’s tone in that article was forthright in a way that, I expect, he imagined to be the tough talk of a respected international elder statesman getting down to brass tacks. Rather, than, say, the stamping of a butterfly in Kipling.  

‘As Congress debates and votes on this funding package for Ukraine,’ he wrote, ‘I am going to drop all diplomatic niceties […] ‘I do not want us to show the weakness displayed against Hitler in the 1930s. He came back for more, costing us far more lives to stop his aggression.’ Was that really going to have the effect he imagined?

Leaving aside that diplomatic niceties are what diplomacy is for, it’s a little hubristic to lecture our American cousins on foreign policy; not least when the cliche you instinctively reach for is the appeasement of Germany before the Second World War.