It is disturbing that a huge victory for civilisation over the Islamic State can be met with silence by the British and American governments.

We did it! One of the Middle East’s most important UNESCO World Heritage Sites – some would say a cradle of civilisation – has been freed from the clutches of a death cult bent on it’s destruction.

But wait, what’s that? We didn’t actually do anything. All plaudits go to the antiheroes of the story, Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad.

It’s like any number of movies. The bad guy – normally because the audience loves them way too much for them to be unequivocally evil – teams up with the hero to fight a greater enemy in the sequel.

However, this is not a movie, and the likes of Barack Obama, David Cameron and Francois Hollande seem completely unwilling to go along with the script.

Even after terrorist attacks which have cumulatively killed over a hundred people in the heart of Europe, these Western leaders see the Islamic state as no more of a threat than Putin and Assad.

They didn’t have to say much, just the tiniest bit of qualified praise for the Syrian army and the Russian air force in retaking Palmyra would have sufficed.

Even Boris Johnson stepped up to the plate.

“If Putin’s troops have helped winkle the maniacs from Palmyra, then (it pains me to admit) that is very much to the credit of the Russians,” he wrote in his Daily Telegraph column.

Encouraging stuff from our next PM, but for now we are stuck with Prime Minister Cameron, a man living in a foreign policy fantasy world, still believing that his tiny rabble of ‘moderate rebels’ will march on Damascus, topple a dictator, crush the Islamic State and turn Syria into a shining beacon of democracy, all in time for supper.

Like Obama and Hollande, he hasn’t said anything about Palmyra because any success for Putin over the Islamic State is to be met with ambivalence. They are equals, what difference does it make to us if one bad guy defeats another. There is no place for either in our utopia.

These leaders were so much more comfortable when Putin was bombing their beloved ‘moderate rebels’ back to the Stone Age, because at least they could complain about it. At least they could propagate the laughable myth that Assad and the Russians were only attacking Western-backed rebels and not interested in fighting ISIS at all, that all the bad guys were in it together.

Now that the Russians have handed ISIS the biggest defeat in its short history, and had more success in fighting terrorism in a few months than we have in the entire 21st century, none of our sanctimonious leaders know what to do.