Leading article: The flash fires of moral outrage

How brightly, but how briefly, the fire of moral indignation blazes! The crisis in Burma was headline news in Britain for almost the whole of last week – already, this weekend, we sense that the heat is lessening. The whole world may be watching Burma, as Gordon Brown warned the junta, but already its eyes are glancing elsewhere.

Just as, before last week, the great moral issue of foreign affairs was the appalling misery to which Robert Mugabe had subjected the people of Zimbabwe, and the pusillanimous attitude to him of the European Union. Before that, the most visible stain upon the conscience of the world was the slow genocide in Sudan.

As we praise our sister newspaper, The Independent, which was first to report the wave of protest that threatens the grip of the military in Burma, we are bound to ask searching questions too about what will happen when the caravan of global condemnation moves on.

As Joan Smith points out in her trenchant analysis today, the flurry of diplomatic activism by the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary achieved almost precisely nothing last week. Gordon Brown broke off from conference business in Bournemouth to warn the Burmese military that "the age of impunity is over". He wrote letters to the UN and the EU. Mr Miliband flew to New York for a meeting of the UN Security Council. But China and Russia vetoed a proposal for sanctions; while the EU, the Association of South East Asian Nations and the British Government have done nothing more concrete than urge restraint on the Burmese authorities. Only the US has actually done anything, tightening its own sanctions.

That does not mean, of course, that Mr Brown was wrong to warn the Burmese regime. On the cold-war principle of never being sure what one's adversary might do, the mere threat of consequences for human rights abuses could have held the generals back from an even more brutal crackdown on the protests.

But, as became quickly clear last week, effective international pressure on the Burmese regime can come only from China. In that sense, the situation is analogous to that of Zimbabwe, where Mugabe's survival depends on South Africa.

The question then becomes how best to bring these powers, long regarded as secondary players in international diplomacy, to assume their responsibilities. Propping up the Burmese junta is only one of a list of charges against China. The occupation of Tibet is the longest-standing. There is the persecution of the Falun Gong. And there is China's use of its UN veto (with Russia, again) to obstruct more vigorous action to protect the people of Darfur.

Of course, we cannot fight all these battles at once. Indeed, on its own, Britain cannot fight any of them. But we have to try our utmost, as Mr Brown's school motto had it. We have to work with patient diplomacy to build the alliances to make sanctions – and military action if necessary – work. We must not allow Tony Blair's disastrous involvement in Iraq to discredit the idea of humanitarian intervention altogether.

Part of the driving force behind Mr Blair's foreign policy was the laudable desire to end tyranny around the world. One of the weaker arguments against the Iraq intervention – when there were so many strong ones – was that we should not act against Saddam Hussein if we did nothing about repressive regimes in Burma, North Korea or Zimbabwe. It was an argument with which Mr Blair was rightly impatient: "Let's get rid of them all – I don't because I can't, but when you can you should." Unfortunately, just because you can does not mean you should. The rest, including Mr Blair's premiership, is history.

Now, with a new Prime Minister and a new Foreign Secretary, we have the chance to learn the lessons of the past decade. "The lesson is that it's not good enough to have good intentions," David Miliband declared ingenuously from the conference platform last week. Another lesson was that, "while there are military victories, there never is a military solution". Fortunately, perhaps, for him and Mr Brown, there are no sensible military options in Burma, Zimbabwe or Sudan. Meanwhile, intensive diplomatic effort seems to be paying dividends in North Korea.

When it comes to putting pressure on South Africa to act in Zimbabwe, the situation is complicated by Mugabe's playing of the anti-colonial card. In the case of China, however, it happens that there is something that Beijing wants from the West that could be withheld: our participation in next year's Olympic Games. It is surely time at least to ask the question: should we take part in the Olympics while the Chinese leadership shows such disrespect for universal human rights?