Those born in the decades after the war may have made the mistake of believing that the world could never go back to that.
And 24 years ago, as I gave my talk in a New York City still traumatised by 9/11, did I too make the mistake of thinking the post-World War Two order, underpinned, as it was, by American might, was the new permanent normal? I think I did.
For we did not foresee then a world in which trust in traditional sources of news and information would be corroded by a rising cynicism, turbo-charged by social media and, increasingly now, AI.
In any age of economic stagnation and extremes of inequality, popular trust in democratic institutions corrodes. It has been corroding not just in the US but across the western world for decades now. As such Trump may be a symptom, not a cause, of Carney’s “rupture” with the post-World War Two order.
Watching those old men making their way through the Normandy cemeteries was a graphic and poignant reminder: democracy, the rule of law, accountable government are not naturally occurring phenomena; they are not even, historically speaking, normal. They have to be fought for, built, sustained, defended.
And that is the challenge from here facing what Mark Carney called “the middle powers”.