In a submission for the hotly contested prize for fatuous belligerence over Ukraine, Ben Wallace, UK secretary of state for defence, has spoken of a ‘whiff of Munich’ regarding negotiations to end the crisis. It may only be a matter of time before he, or some fellow tub-thumper, reaches into the historical locker and pulls out the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962 as an even more pertinent parallel.
The story writes itself: just as the reckless Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev brought the world to the brink of nuclear war by installing missiles in Cuba but was forced to withdraw thanks to unyielding resolve from President John F. Kennedy, so the equally reckless Vladimir Putin can only be forced into abandoning his threat to Ukraine by firm and fearless defiance on the part of Joe Biden.
But that story, though almost universally accepted by the scholarly commentariat, is entirely wrong in just about every important respect.
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