It was probably inevitable that Russia’s war on the Ukrainian people would rekindle Cold War tropes of “East versus West”, with particular emphasis on a “revival of the West”.

Whatever one may think of “the West”, it is more than a cartographic reality, as the late economist Angus Maddison described the European world. The revivalism either marks the return of European dominance of the world or, when considered in the longue durée, it may be analogous to the 72-second “Wow! signal” detected by Ohio State University’s Big Ear Telescope in 1977...

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