Donald Trump is confirmed as the Republican nominee for US president. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, tightens the authoritarian screw after a failed military coup. Scores die in another dreadful terrorist attack in France. You could add to this list the blow to western cohesion struck by Britain’s vote to quit the EU and China’s defiance of an international court’s ruling on its territorial claims in the South China Sea.

On the face of it these events are unconnected. Mr Trump has probably never heard of China’s nine-dash line. Boris Johnson, Britain’s foreign secretary, has shown more concern to lock out Turkish migrants than about the health of that nation’s democracy. The slaughter in Nice may have owed as much to the disturbed state of mind of the perpetrator as to the proselytising of the self-styled Islamic State. The madness, and badness, will pass.

Take a harder look and some uncomfortable patterns emerge: rising nationalism, identity politics, disdain for institutions and a fracturing of the rules-based international system. Governments have lost control, and citizens faith. The belligerence in domestic politics spills over on to the global stage. This is not quite a Hobbesian world but the direction of travel is evident.