As the probability of war in the Indo-Pacific rises, Australia consciously jeopardises its energy security. In America, where a revolution is conceivable, President Biden recently stoked the fire by lamenting that the SCOTUS is ideologically corrupt. And in the UK, the Tory government is suffering serious woes having forgotten an age-old lesson: there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

The harsh truth is that these self-afflictions, and many others like them, reflect decades of lousy political leadership.