As a historian, I’m not a “history-repeats-itself” man. Yet I am with Mark Twain when he said, “History doesn’t repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes.” Does the Ukraine/Crimea crisis have a touch of the Mark Twains about it? Is it a rhyming couplet with the Cold War? Yes and no. But we need firstly to distinguish between two Cold Wars. The first is what I would call the High Cold War, which generated a 40-year-plus confrontation between East and West from 1947, the year of my birth, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.We children of the uranium age know what a nuclear exchange would do: the destruction of ourselves and our world in a single afternoon of flash, explosion, heat and radiation in unimaginable quantity and ferocity, particularly once the
03 April 2014, The Tablet
‘In domestic Russian terms, Vladimir Putin could well have had his “finest hour” ’
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