It had been easy enough to give her father the official line, but it was different with Erin. Vincent said, ‘I’m not meant to talk about it.’

‘It’s fine. I was just curious.’ She was quiet for half a mile, and then she said, ‘I wondered what you’d seen that made you think we’ve caused more bloodshed than we’ve prevented.’

His line from last night.

Vincent glanced at her. ‘I don’t know. Newspapers.’

‘But do you mean because we have a history of horrendous foreign policy, we shouldn’t ever intervene in anything?’

He took a moment to consider that.

Erin said, ‘I think it’s likely we’ve committed war crimes on almost every continent. But it’s stupid to say, I don’t know … that we can’t, for instance, intervene in Kosovo, because a previous administration bombed Nicaragua, and that was wrong.’

‘I think it was more like an atrocity.’

‘Okay. Whichever term you like. I just mean it makes no sense to be hamstrung by past events that you had no role in.’

Vincent said, ‘It does if those past events caused massive destruction, and there’s a likelihood of you doing the same.’

Erin said, ‘No, in that case, you should take steps to diminish that likelihood. Rather than just say, Oh well. We haven’t had much luck in the past. Continue with your genocide.’

She fell quiet for another half-mile, but her hands were tense on the wheel, and Vincent knew there was more coming.

She said, ‘It’s a strange culture, really. People seem to have a lot of energy to complain on Twitter about social justice issues. You know. Microaggressions, or using the wrong pronoun, or cultural appropriation. I personally think the most important social justice issue of, say, the last five or six years was the mass slaughter of Yazidi people by ISIS. But there wasn’t a lot of coverage of that. Or much of an interest in deterring it, meaningfully. I think for all its supposed good intentions, there’s a large component of white Western culture that’s basically indifferent to the suffering of people in developing countries.’

Vincent said, ‘But we can make things better by bombing them?’

‘No. I think we can make things better by recognising the value of human life, and that it should be protected with force, and not economic sanctions. In the same way you combat burglary by bringing in police. Not by raising the price of crowbars.’