TONY LEON: Like Putin, SA’s ANC leaders are steeped in nostalgia for the Cold War
The only countries able to get through to Moscow, oppose the invasion and sent arms or aid to Ukraine
On February 24, when Vladimir Putin rolled his tanks into Ukraine and violently breached the sovereign border and territorial integrity of an independent state, I received a message from a friend. “Mark this date,” it read. “Today, like 9/11, something profoundly shifted in the world and its consequences will be huge.”
Writing in the Financial Times last weekend Francis Fukuyama — who famously suggested that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the “end of history” and the rise of a peaceful era of globalisation premised on the permanence of liberal democracy — gave a gloomy update. “February 24 has been seen as a critical turning point in world history. Many have said it definitively marks the end of the post-Cold War era we thought emerged from after 1991 [with the dissolution of the Soviet Union] … the end of the end of history,” he wrote...
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