Samuels account amounts to a stark warning of the danger associated with distance opening up between an underlying reality and an invented reality that could be successfully messaged, and managed, from the White House. “This possibility opened the door to a new potential for a large-scale disaster – like the war in Iraq”, Samuels suggests. (Samuels does not specifically mention Ukraine, although this is implied throughout the argument).

This – both the Obama tale, as told by David Samuels, and Walter Kirn’s story of California – augment Aurelien’s point about Ukraine and European military incompetence and lack of professionalism on the field: It is one of allowing a schism to open up between contrived narrative and reality – “which”, Samuels warns “is to say that, with enough money, operatives could create and operationalize mutually reinforcing networks of activists and experts to validate a messaging arc that would short-circuit traditional methods of validation and analysis, and lead unwary actors and audience members alike to believe that things that they had never believed; or even heard of before: Were in fact not only plausible, but already widely accepted within their specific peer groups”.

It constitutes the path to disaster – even risking nuclear disaster in the case of the Ukraine conflict. Will the ‘Competency Crisis’ reaching across such varied terrain trigger a re-think as Walter Kirn – a writer on cultural change – insists?