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

It’s partly because they had hoped for the best so as to avoid preparing for the worst. But it’s also because they didn’t think the world worked this way: an aggressor attacks a country that was minding its own business and is rewarded. Westerners of our generation don’t 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.

The good-guy theory of history seemed confirmed by actual Western history. Our central modern morality tale was victory over Hitler, followed by the West’s historically anomalous 80-year “Long Peace”, based on an international order built by the US, the good sheriff.

As Napoleon supposedly said, “To understand the man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was 20.” When I was 20, a global progressive moment left me with an enduring cognitive bias towards optimism. In three months from November 1989, eastern European communism fell and Nelson Mandela walked out of jail. Freedom had triumphed, because people wanted freedom. It felt like a law of history.