4:7 Who should be your allies in the war on Evil?

Obviously crucial in all this is to work out your alliances properly. Here the important thing is not to let romantic or old-fashioned ideas cloud your judgements. Your great goal is to rid the world of Evil. Yet the Evil you wish to destroy cannot be equated with facile matters such as human rights records, democratic achievements, liberal policies or even, sadly, the Christian faith. Wishy-washy friends who have these values, what some have called for instance ‘old Europe’ (out-dated, liberal, socialist, anti-totalitarian), needs to be set on one side. Much better to have the people with the tanks and the vision.

Or the money. For there may be a few big economies who can help to bank-roll you, even if they are unfortunately (and you should work on this) bound by the outmoded constitution you imposed on them, and hence debarred from sending their troops along. Since these wars are tremendously expensive, and you are already hugely in debt, the money bags are needed. If the friends are reluctant, you can threaten and blackmail them in various ways. Make sure their relations with other neutral countries in their region do not become too friendly so that they slip out of your power.

So you really must think radically. This is a changed world. The United Nations path was a necessary, but very limited, experiment. We must return to the time-honoured crusade by the strong and noble to crush the godless minions of Satan by whatever means is at your disposal.

If you act in your own self-interest, or at least a pair of you do, then you can talk about the ‘coalition of the willing’ and the preservation of the international order against the vacillating feebleness of other nations. If the members of the United Nations try to work out a road-map which will establish a peaceful path, sabotage it.

There are various ways to do this. One successful way you have used in the past is to infiltrate the ‘inspectors’ from the international organization with your spies, impose humiliating and degrading regimes on the regimes to be inspected, and then to respond in fury when the spies and inspectors are thrown out, saying it is tantamount to an attack on you.

If this does not entirely work, and the inspectors are invited in again, despite the humiliation, do not allow them to finish their work. Hurry and harry them along. Say that a few weeks will make all the difference between your world being attacked or not. Forget the decades of turning a blind eye to other powers proven to have nuclear and other weapons. This must be dealt with tomorrow. And if the inspectors plead for more time or say they have not found anything, or are close to establishing the truth, brush them aside.