Nearly everyone has seen the dramatic images of the Amazon ablaze. Tens of thousands of fires — intentionally started or caused by logging, farming, mining and other human activities — have broken out over the past year alone.

History at any moment can be understood as a snapshot, telling us where we are; or as a moving picture, telling us not just where we are but where we have been and where we may be headed. It is a distinction with an enormous difference.

US President Donald Trump is spending nearly two weeks in Asia, visiting Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Putting China at the center of the trip makes sense, because it is the most important in both strategic and economic terms.

It is too soon to know whether and how the challenge posed by North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs will be resolved. But it is not too early to consider what that challenge could mean for a part of the world that has in many ways defied history.

North Korea has produced a number of nuclear warheads and is developing ballistic missiles capable of delivering them around the world. Many governments are debating how to prevent or slow further advances in North Korea’s capacity and what should be done if such efforts fail.

More than four decades ago, US National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger declared 1973 to be “The Year of Europe.” His aim was to highlight the need to modernize the Atlantic relationship and, more specifically, the need for America’s European allies to do more with the US in the Middle East and