I forget which comedian it was who joked, “A friend will help you move house; a good friend will help you move a body.” My mind, of late, has been preoccupied with broken friendships and impending doom.

Perhaps it’s to be expected given the events since U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent inauguration. “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen,” Lenin apparently said. As I sit writing in Central Europe, bombs are being dropped not too far from me by a despotic regime that the United States is now aligning with and which, without too much convincing, would march further westwards into currently peaceful parts of the continent. Europe is rearming for the first time since the 1930s. NATO is a bad sneeze away from death. “The end of Pax Americana is clearly in sight,” Ian Buruma wrote last week. “The free world needs a new leader,” Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, has said.

As I sit writing, Southeast Asia is also looking destined for more instability and less peace. The Myanmar civil war is well into its fourth year and shows no signs of letting up. The term “failed state” is now on the lips. Irredentist claims are becoming mainstream again. Tensions continue to mount between Cambodia and Thailand. I cannot see how the region is going to tackle the insurmountable menace of cyberscammers without either greater direct involvement of the Chinese police or some sort of intrusion into a neighbor’s national sovereignty (or the latter by the former).