Ukraine crisis - Neutrality may become a real issue

Just over 50 years ago, as the confrontation between the US and Russia over Soviet plans to base nuclear missiles in Cuba moved ever closer to the kind of catastrophe that threatens world stability and peace, or whatever the current version of that is, US President John F Kennedy ordered that all senior American military commanders read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, the Pulitzer Prize-winning and seminal history of the first months of the First World War.

Kennedy wanted his commanders to understand the almost irreversible threat posed by the forceful process of escalation in conflict. He wanted them to understand that confrontation builds a momentum of its own and that it can almost assume a persona, that it can become the enemy of rational thought or the kind of intervention and pause that avert war.

We are not yet at that point over the Ukraine but perceptive book dealers may have already reordered copies of one of Tuchman’s great, ever more relevant histories. It would be reassuring, too, to imagine that at least some of the main players in the growing conflict have learnt the lessons from a century ago and so effectively recorded by Tuchman.