Since February 2013, when President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea, we have found ourselves reaching into the past — specifically to the cold war — to make sense of geopolitics.
From the 1950s, the USSR had nuclear weapons to compete with American might. It led a military coalition, the Warsaw Pact, that intimidated western Europe. Soviet ideology repudiated all that Nato countries stood for in politics and economics.
There were times, notably the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when the world trembled at the prospect of imminent nuclear Armageddon. It remained a constant possibility, by accident or deliberate action, until the late 1980s, when US President Ronald Reagan