One disquieting lesson of history is that, although world wars affect nearly everyone, the task of avoiding them falls to a tiny number of decisionmakers. And those decisionmakers are sometimes fools.

Today’s world looks “quite a bit” like the world before 1914, argues Odd Arne Westad, a professor of history at Yale, in “The Coming Storm”. Great powers are seeking to dominate their backyards. An era of globalisation is giving way to one of rising nationalism. Growing numbers of people are blaming other countries for their problems. Indeed, mutual suspicion is even worse now than it was on the eve of the first world war. Two in five Americans think their country will go to war with China in the next five years; two-thirds of Russians believe that the war in Ukraine is a “civilisational struggle” with the West.