Why didn’t we give peace a chance?

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Now comes a war and shows that we still haven’t crawled out on all fours from the barbaric stage of our history. We have learned to wear suspenders, to write clever editorials and to make chocolate milk, but when we have to decide seriously a question of the coexistence of a few tribes on the rich peninsula of Europe, we are helpless to find a way other than mutual mass slaughter.

If you had to guess the author, what would you say? George Orwell? Isaiah Berlin? Malcolm Muggeridge? Nope. Those words were written by, of all people, Leon Trotsky, which adds a particularly sour irony to the fact that they are, and remain, exactly right. They are quoted as the epigraph to a chapter early on in Niall Ferguson’s new book and they more or less encapsulate its theme.

At the outset of the 20th century, we in the West looked as if we had it more or less taped.