Britain and the United States have issued their clearest call yet for the Myanmar Government to step in and stop what the United Nations calls an ‘ethnic cleansing’ operation in the country’s west.

More than 400 people have been killed in Rakhine State and nearly 400,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh, overwhelming the nation’s border camps, reports abc.net.au.

The US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, has called the crisis a ‘defining moment’ for Myanmar and its de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.

Perhaps they compared notes on the fact they are both the subject of rumours they are on the verge of resigning, because they are so fed up with their jobs, reports news.sky.com.

Or they may have consoled each other knowing they are both under pressure from a chorus of critics to stand down.

They might have bonded over the fact they are both accused of being unqualified and unsuitable for their jobs.

What they have most in common, though, is a responsibility for preventing the world going to hell in a handcart at time when it appears to be accelerating in that direction. And that is surely what will have preoccupied them most.

Rex Tillerson has been derided as a reluctant Secretary of State - unsurprisingly after he told one journalist he only took the job because his wife told him to.

And more recently he has been criticised as an absentee one, too. America’s chief diplomat has kept a strangely low profile as his administration faced its toughest foreign policy test yet: the nuclear crisis with North Korea.

He and Boris Johnson share a mutual ambition to see a ‘denuclearised Korean Peninsula’, said the latter in a press conference on Thursday.

That betrays a common weakness for wishful thinking.

They both aimed their fire at Myanmar’s military, praised Aung San Suu Kyi’s past achievements and gave her the benefit of the doubt.

They hope she will soon speak out against the army she shares power with and shame it into stopping one of the most barbarous military operations of the 21st century.

They know that public criticism of Myanmar’s stubborn leader is only likely to be counterproductive.

They called on Myanmar to stop what Tillerson called the horrors of that campaign and, said Johnson, allow the Rohingya to return.

Diplomatic pressure will intensify to that end at the UN General Assembly next week.

But for hundreds of thousands of destitute stateless people living in squalid camps in Bangladesh it all comes too late.