I speak of those unlikely brothers in suffering, Boris Yeltsin and Paul Gascoigne. Boris and Gazza share a disease called alcoholism, and both suffer it in the public eye.
These booze brothers are good fodder for columnists, a godsend for the media. Men to be angry with, to laugh at, to cluck with indignation at Drunks, losers, wasters, bums. When Boris stumbles on the red carpet, the cameras are there to record his humiliation for posterity. IN A dacha in the forests outside Moscow, a man with a terminal illness is struggling to hang on to life.

Somewhere in England, another man with the same disease is contemplating the mess his life has become They are men at rock bottom. Today it gives us the opportunity to pay tribute to two exceptional men.. The lesson of the post-Cold-War era so far is that US leadership of groups of interested nations (sometimes described pompously as “the international community”) is the best way to resolve conflicts. The United Nations on its own is not yet capable of reacting with speed, policy coherence or military power. And the US on its own cannot act as the world’s policeman; it simply ends up bombing an aspirin factory in Khartoum in order to distract attention from the President’s local difficulties.But there are limits to the power of the US, even acting in concert with other nations, as we have seen in the Middle East and in Kosovo.So, however flawed the Nobel Peace Prize, it is still valuable as an incentive to political leaders who want their place in history, because, in writing the first draft, a peace prize is a good first stab at a measure of moral greatness. The turmoil in Russia, the economic downturn in east Asia and the Pakistani nuclear tests provide a gloomy backdrop to a picture of civil wars gradually replacing the more static international conflicts of the Cold War period.Yesterday’s award is less likely to be mocked by history than the one four years ago, shared by Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin. The Oslo Agreement may have been a step forward but, as the Israelis and Palestinians attempt to repeat the experience in Maryland, the Middle East peace process has taken two steps back.

What will really determine whether or not the world is a more peaceful place over the next few years will not be the Swedish academy’s attempt to compare and choose between chalk and cheese, but the effectiveness with which the United States deploys its leadership role. Both sides are armed with much-diminished moral authority, and neither side has a real incentive to try to solve the apparently insoluble.And, of course, peace prizes are a feeble mechanism for advancing the cause of peace around the world. Next week the International Institute for Strategic Studies publishes its invaluable guide to armed conflicts all over the world, which will suggest that the last year has been one of great uncertainty and worsening bloodshed. The idea of peace prizes makes as much sense as those of beauty contests, literary awards and lists of the 10 greatest pop songs this century. But it is possible – indeed imperative – to make judgements about the causes of modern conflicts and the best ways to resolve them.