Much speculation in the Guardian around lively septuagenarian Irwin Stelzer, and the influence he does or doesn’t carry.

Having just returned from the land of the free, I think it’s worth recalling that Stelzer ranks only modestly in the neo-con league, behind such luminaries as Norman Podhoretz. Last Thursday night, I went to hear Norman promote his book Let’s Bomb Iran – sorry – World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism.

Incidentially, Podhoretz passes for a foreign policy expert, but actually came across as a podium bully. He lost any sympathy I might have had when he chose to use George Kennan – of all people – in support for his simplistic and ideological appeal for a military strike on Iran. Kennan you will recall was the architect of containment in the Cold War, and moreover had a Lippmann-esque suspicion of public opinion, especially when led by scabrous old sabre-rattlers like Podhoretz.

In case Norman had forgotten, prior to the invasion of Iraq, Kennan remarked “whenever you have a possibility of going in two ways, either for peace or for war, for peaceful methods or for military methods, in the present age there is a strong prejudice for the peaceful ones.”

So, the foreign policy debate in the US is not about EU referenda and the potential flip-flopping of personalities in Britain’s centrist political establishment – it is about Iran.

But I digress. If Norman and the rest don’t care, we should at least be grateful that Irwin is so concerned with our small island nation. This is the intellectual equivalent of Big in Japan.

And it’s only the need to feed the weekly beast of New York Post controversy that had him damning our nation’s capital last week (yes, I can play jingoistic games too):

New York is now one of the safest cities in the world and London one of the most dangerous. Violent crime is way up. There are daily reports of school children killed on the way to school even if they surrender their cellphones to the “hoodies” (muggers who wear hoods to screen their faces from the ubiquitous TV cameras).

British prisons are so overcrowded that dangerous criminals are released before their sentences are up to make room for the next batch. And the communist mayor of London welcomes anti-Semitic Muslim preachers who call for the death of Jews, homosexuals, Americans and anyone else who disagrees with them. Not a pretty picture.

Quite the intellectual, then…