In January 2018, when Donald Trump was in the second year of his first term as US president, Angela Merkel, in her 13th year as German chancellor, gave a gloomy speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos. She opened her remarks with a warning from Europe’s past. Politicians had “sleep-walked” into the first world war. As the number of surviving eyewitnesses to the second world war dwindled, she added, subsequent generations would have to prove they understood the fragility of peace. “We need to ask ourselves if we have really learned from history or not.”
Fast forward eight years. Vladimir Putin’s territorial aggression harries Europe’s eastern flank. To the west, Trump, now in his second term and guest of honour at Davos, threatens to annex Greenland. This is not a world that has internalised the lessons of the 20th century.
