Through the lens of history, Trump’s legacy will be more of a blotch than a Maga masterpiece |
For those who lived through the cold war, the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, was an unforgettable moment. The sinister watch towers with their searchlights and armed guards, the minefields in no-man’s land, the notorious Checkpoint Charlie border post, and the Wall itself – all were swept aside in an extraordinary, popular lunge for freedom.
Less than a month later, on 3 December 1989, at a summit in Malta, US president George HW Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared that after more than 40 years, the cold war was over. All agreed it was a historic turning point.
Yet fast forward to December 2025, and one question persists: did the cold war – the west’s many-fronted, global confrontation with Moscow and its allies – ever truly end? Led by Vladimir Putin for the past 25 years, Russia has resumed the familiar role of an aggressive, expansionist power stalking Europe’s borderlands. Ukraine, the Baltic republics, Georgia, Moldova, even Poland, are again treated as property or prey.
With hindsight, it seems that 1989 “turning point” was less than wholly decisive. In fact, it has been turned on its head.
This phenomenon is nothing new. Successive generations typically believe their experience is unique – yet, historically, factually, ideologically, they are usually wrong. When major geopolitical shifts occur, they are breathlessly described as “historic” and “unparalleled”. Because history is insufficiently studied, because perspectives are limited by human lifespans, because the same mistakes are repeated over and over, momentous events are hailed as watersheds, landmarks and epochal inflection points. Almost invariably, they’re not.
Think of the