Goodbye to the good guy

Might Western faith in the march of progress have been misplaced?

- Simon Kuper

It is odd that the European response to being abandoned by Mr Donald Trump was bafflement. After all, he had long signalled that he admired Mr Vladimir Putin and felt unattached to Nato. Yet his plan for "peace" in Ukraine seemed to shock European officials.

It is partly because they had hoped for the best so as to avoid preparing for the worst. But it is also because they did not think the world worked this way: An aggressor attacks a country that was minding its own business and is rewarded.

Westerners of our generation do not tend to expect the bad guys to win, because we were raised to believe in progress. That belief gave us a false conceptual frame for reading the world.

Western faith in progress was a blend of Judeo-Christian morality and Enlightenment reason. God smites the wicked, people grow wiser, and scientific advances improve life.

My 90-year-old aunt may remain stricken by her brother's death from measles in 1939, but medicine was eradicating tragedy. Our films and fairy tales reinforced this optimism. Good guys win the shoot-outs, and Cinderella lives happily ever after.