In his brilliant book tracing the origins of World War I, "The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914," Christopher Clark says, "The protagonists were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world."
As the prestigious Munich Security Conference wrapped up Feb. 18, the pervading feeling of many longtime observers is that we are again sleepwalking toward a conflict nobody wants or needs — this time with nuclear weapons. The conversations on the platform ranged from U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham's suggestion of a European version of Guantanamo Bay to take in the hundreds of Syrian jihadis, to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's question to the Iranian foreign minister as he waved around a piece of an Iranian drone: "Do you recognize this?"
By the end of the conference, almost no one could recognize the international regime, which seems to change continually these days under the press of events.