“The story of the human race is war,” said Winston Churchill. “Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.”

In recent decades, policymakers and business leaders who attended gatherings at Davos and had the ears of western leaders were inclined to think otherwise. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a near-consensus prevailed among them that peace was the natural condition of the developed world and that globalisation was immune from geopolitical risk.

This confidence extended to a belief that generating prosperity through trade was conducive to democracy in developing countries — a notion that played an important part in the west’s decision to welcome China into the global economy and grant it membership of the World Trade Organization in 2001. There is, of course, a superficial plausibility in a logic that echoes Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, who declared “Let me have men about me that are fat” because he feared the “l(fā)ean and hungry look” of the murderous Cassius.