Has our luck finally run out on matters of foreign policy?

The year 2019 may well be remembered as the year our luck in foreign policy ran out.

How so? The period after World War II was an incredibly plastic moment in history, and we were incredibly lucky that a group of leaders understood it was vital to lock in our democratic values and interests in global institutions and alliances.

In another plastic moment, in 1989, we again were lucky leaders came together to peacefully manage the fall of communism, the reunification of Germany and the rise of a quasi-capitalist China.

It’s now another hugely plastic moment — a moment when the world is experiencing a change in the climate, in globalization, in work and in communications.

These four changes are creating a whole new set of governing challenges. They are the challenges stemming from the erosion of the pillars of democracy and order built in the previous two eras — but without a single big, obvious boogeyman to galvanize us.

I’m talking about disorder of nation-states fracturing under the pressure of these changes and spilling out masses of refugees, triggering populist, nationalist backlashes all across the West and the disorder spread by a Russia that wants to keep the West in turmoil.

I’m talking about the disorder that will come from more and more extreme ideas spread by social networks. And I am talking about the crushing of freedom that autocrats can now do so much more efficiently with cybertools, like facial recognition and big data, that favor centralized systems.

This time our luck may be running out.

The countries and leaders we counted upon in the past to build a global, strategic adaptation to challenges — the United States and the United States of Europe, i.e., the European Union — are AWOL. And so is their secret sauce.

And what was that? It is described in a new book, “The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal,’’ by William J. Burns, who retired from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2014, after a 33-year diplomatic career that included serving as ambassador to Jordan and Russia and as deputy secretary of state.

Burns argues that what made American (and EU) leadership effective in the first two plastic moments was a spirit of “enlightened self-interest” — meaning sometimes we assumed greater economic or leadership burdens to build a coalition or buttress allies because in the long run, we all would benefit most from the stability and the commerce those would generate. It advanced both our values and our interests.

Trump has gotten rid of most of the “enlightened” part of “enlightened self-interest” and focuses only on the “self-interest,” notes Burns. Trump’s approach, he adds, is more “transactional muscular unilateralism.” But its viability is yet to be proven anywhere.

And the EU is fracturing — thanks to a new generation of leaders who aren’t building big systems but just playing with them, including a bunch of Conservative politician-clowns in the U.K. who pushed for exiting the European Union without any preparation and by lying that Brexit would be easy and profitable.

We’ve never had a greater need for EU and U.S. leaders who are motivated by enlightened self-interest, who appreciate that what’s destabilizing the world in this plastic moment is global and can be confronted only with a global coalition. But instead, we are saddled with leaders who are much more adept at breaking things than making things — at going for broke rather than making the best of the bad.

It just feels like our luck is running out.