Dhaka, March 7 -- At the iconic Munich Security Conference held last month, the United States of President Donald Trump read out the riot act to Europeans in tones which suggested that their security was no longer indivisible from America's. In the words of Michael Hirsh of Foreign Policy magazine, a noted commentator whose article evoked the horrors of World War II that had followed from Britain's capitulation to Nazi Germany at Munich in 1938, for "more than eight decades, the word 'Munich' has meant one thing in international relations: a catastrophic policy of appeasement. Now, 'Munich' may soon take on a fresh - and possibly even more fraught - meaning: the voluntary surrender of global hegemony" (this time by America).

Britain's re...