Nearer home there are two Spanish enclaves gouged into the north coast of Morocco that Morocco wants back. Madrid replied: “No chance.”

A resolution by referendum? Ah, here’s the rub. Statesmen only agree to a plebiscite they know they can win. The last one in Gibraltar said about 97 per cent of Gibraltarians wanted to stay British. But in Melilla and Ceuta, the Spanish-Moroccans would probably vote to rejoin Morocco, so they can whistle in the wind for a referendum.

Governments can become mildly lunatic over the most ridiculous of land claims. Some years ago, Moroccans landed on a Spanish-owned, goat-grazing islet called Parsley and a chunk of the Spanish fleet was put to sea.

For years, China lusted after Hong Kong and Macao but wisely waited until the treaties of occupation ran out and the British and Portuguese left peacefully.

Goa was once a Portuguese enclave until the oh-so-peace-loving Indian premier Pandit Nehru invaded and annexed it in a single afternoon.

President Sukarno, dictator of Indonesia, claimed North Borneo (the enclaves of Sabah and Sarawak) was his and sent in troops. We claimed both territories, once ours, belonged to Malaysia and slipped in the Ghurkas and the SAS.

That usually slows ’em down. The secret war eventually fizzled out. The two enclaves still belong to Malaysia.

But if there are two pieces of land whose sudden invasion could easily trigger a huge regional or global war, they are Kashmir and Taiwan.

The latter, formerly Formosa, was the offshore Chinese island to which the defeated Nation­alist Chinese of Chiang-Kai-Shek retreated in 1949 as mainland China fell to Mao Tse Tung’s Communists.

Since then, Beijing has repeatedly claimed it back. But Formosa is now Taiwan, a prosperous, democratic, USA-aligned republic and America would have to take its side ­– and that includes force of arms, of which America has a mighty arsenal.

The two giants India and Pakistan ought to be the jewels in the post-Raj Commonwealth crown. Yet they have been at virtual war since 1947 and twice at actual war because of two small but beautiful enclaves lying between them: Jammu and Kashmir.

India owns and occupies them; Pakistan claims them. Once lovely resorts for tourists, they are proving grounds for fundamentalist terrorists (or patriotic liberators) and given over to kidnaps, murders and riots.

India and Pakistan are incredibly passionate about Kashmir; both have huge armies and nuclear weapons and Pakistan is profoundly unstable. Why not a referendum? Because Kashmir is mostly Muslim, would vote pro-Pakistan and India, therefore, will not grant one.

These disputed enclaves are almost all the residues of former empires which collapsed and withdrew. The latest such empire was the Soviet one, of which Vladimir Putin is a loyal son and unreformed devotee. A majority of Russians absolutely agree with him.

As it ebbed in defeat 17 years ago, the empire left behind, as a tide leaves rock pools, enclaves of ethnic Russians which Mos­cow had deliberately implanted to head off any sign of nationalism. Latvia, Lithu­ania and Estonia, for example, have large Russian minorities.

Some of these disputes aren’t even with Moscow. Nagorno-Karabakh is 80 per cent Armenian-ethnic but belongs to Azerbaijan, another potential powder keg.

The end of the Soviet empire was the messiest of them all and left a tangle of claims and mixed populations, especially in the Caucasus and around the Black and Caspian Seas. Now a new and ruthless tsar in Moscow is using his oil wealth to afford the armed strength to avenge the death of empire, even threatening Ukraine.

South Ossetia and Abkhazia were Soviet, then Georgian, now Russian again. Short of an insane war, they are not recoverable. They will die down, like storms in a samovar.

But what of the future? Will Putin go on? And if he does? The West can penalise Russia politically, diplomatic­ally, economically. And we should. But we must not plunge into war for an enclave in the Caucasian patchwork quilt no bigger than Norfolk. Sad but true.