2022 has been the pinnacle of an age of disruption ✒️ The oddity of this year as it moves to a close is that having three prime ministers in two months seems the least of it 🔵 James Naughtie for ipaperviews
Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaking at the Commonwealth Business Forum at the ICC in Birmingham in two months seems the least of it.
Historians of the decades since 1945 talk about a few moments after Cuba when either mistakes or misunderstandings might have led to a nuclear exchange between Washington and Moscow, but the world in general never truly believed it was likely. The ironic thread in the story is that Putin was convinced in 2016 that he had achieved two foreign policy successes that would burnish his dream of an imperial Russia – the election of Donald Trump and Brexit. Who can say if it was the hubris that followed that led him directly to invade Ukraine, but those disruptive events certainly gave him hope, and spurred him on to what seems a fatal assault on his own dream.