The year 2020 was, by any measure, rich in awakenings and reckonings. None were as earth-shaking as those forced upon the United States, Britain and India.
The pandemic found three of the world’s most prominent democracies shockingly underprepared, governed by leaders as incompetent as they were deluded and encumbered with states that had steadily rendered themselves incapable of performing their most basic duty: protecting human lives.
In each case, stridently advanced claims — whether to be a new superpower (India), to become one again (Britain) or to provide moral leadership to the world (U.S.) — were broken on the wheel of an unforgiving virus.