Vladimir putin

As the Ukraine situation heats up, you can already picture the insider account Vice President Kamala Harris will publish one day in her 2025 bestseller Thirty-One Days in February. But then, as any survivor of the Cuban Missile Crisis is bound to tell President Joe Biden, “I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine, and you, Joe Biden, are no Jack Kennedy.” One of the clichés if not the myths about the Cuban Missile Crisis was that President Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev were playing chicken and Khrushchev “blinked." Under threat of potential nuclear war, he then decided to withdraw the Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba. We now know that what really happened was more complicated than the initial reports made it appear.

Few things are sure in life: death, taxes and Glenn Greenwald advocating whatever position happens to be in the interests of Vladimir Putin. The self-styled civil libertarian rose to prominence during the George W. Bush administration for his withering attacks on American counterterrorism policies. Later, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his role in facilitating Edward Snowden’s leak of government documents. Always a rancorous figure who bristled at attempts to place him in a partisan box, Greenwald started to upset his confederates on the left and develop a fan base on the right during the Trump years. Greenwald was one of the most vocal critics of the narrative positing that the new American president was a pawn of the Russian one.

Why does Vladimir Putin need Russia Today and Sputnik News when the western media are doing such a great job on his behalf? Throughout his two decades in power, Putin has yearned for international respect. Failing that, he’ll settle for fear. And what more satisfying outcome could there be for a serial sabre-rattler like Putin to have his bluff finally taken seriously? For weeks, British papers and TV have been filled with images of scary Russian tanks, warships and artillery blasting away — mostly provided, if you check the photo credits, by Russia’s Ministry of Defence. Since November, the US and British governments have been issuing increasingly strident warnings that Putin is preparing an imminent and massive attack on Ukraine.

Against the backdrop of the Ukraine crisis, we have been bombarded with many historical analogies. Leading the list are the 1961 Berlin standoff and the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis. And then there is that all-time favorite, the 1938 Munich Agreement. Those crises should certainly not be regarded as ancient history. But then why go back 60 or 80 years when you can walk down memory lane? Like, say, when an American president was trying to rally the public and mobilize international support in the name of using military force against an alleged bloodthirsty dictator who was supposedly threatening Western geostrategic interests and challenging its liberal democratic values?