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 ¡ª whether to be a new superpower (India), to become one again (Britain) or to provide moral leadership to the world (U.S.) ¡ª were broken on the wheel of an unforgiving virus.