Last week, former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott delivered a speech in London in which he claimed to hear “war drums beating again”. Quoting Winston Churchill, he exhorted the West to rediscover its “moral health and martial vigour”.

These were the very words Churchill uttered soon after the disastrous Munich agreement of September 1938 when, according to the conventional wisdom, Hitler could have been stopped and world war avoided if only Western nations had stood up to the Nazi dictator on Czechoslovakia.