This weekend marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Today, the optimism that event engendered seems wildly misplaced given the conflicts facing many parts of the world, not least the West’s struggle against militant Islam The joyous days at the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which began 25 years ago this weekend when crowds of East Germans, finally allowed by their Government to visit West Germany, surged into the western side of the city, are now tinged with the sort of sepia through which we look back to the Edwardian era. They have been replaced by a sense of what is ­variously described as the new world disorder, gridlock and/or a visitation by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: pestilence, war, famine and death.Natio