Financial Times FT.com

A misreading of the past holds a lesson for future

By Philip Stephens

Published: September 10 2009 22:31 | Last updated: September 10 2009 22:31

Ingram Pinn illustration

Everything was so much tidier before the Berlin Wall came down. There was the small matter of the existential struggle with communism. But after a couple of near-misses, we learned to live with mutually assured destruction. The cold war stand-off was stable and predictable. Security had a single meaning: containing the ambitions of the Soviet Union.

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