I still feel there’s a grain of truth in that vision of Thatcher as a nursery dominatrix, thrashing grown-up little boys who confuse punishment with love. But now I’m 57, I realize the reason Thatcher made our podium is more obvious. A powerful, intelligent woman who knows her mind and is unafraid to use her sexuality as part of her arsenal can act as catnip on certain men.

A new, pleasingly unconventional biography of Thatcher, The Incidental Feminist: Friend, foe, femme fatale? by Tina Gaudoin, places much of its focus on what sociologist Catherine Hakim terms “erotic capital” — the way personal assets, such as glamour and sex appeal, can be used to gain social and economic advantage. Instead of looking at the leader’s political legacy, Gaudoin tracks down Thatcher the woman: daughter, sister, wife, mother, fashion lover, flirt, manipulator of men. The book examines how the Finchley coquette’s utilization of feminine qualities propelled her to the top job, with chapters titled “Autistic Glamour Puss”, “Warrior Queen, Gender Blender?” and “All the Prime Minister’s Men”.

For all the “Attila the Hen” labels and Spitting Image’s puppet of a beaked PM standing at a urinal in a man’s suit, what stands out now is the constant sexual appraisal of a woman who was 53 when she entered Downing Street and 65 when she left. In 1989, Vanity Fair ran a major interview with Thatcher by Gail Sheehy, which contained the following frothy passage: “President Mitterrand says Britain’s prime minister ‘has eyes like Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe’. She also has the nerves of a five-star general and, increasingly, the sexual charisma of a woman in her prime. She manipulates her court of bedazzled male advisers with the skill of Elizabeth I.”

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If you think Sheehy’s wildly overstating the case, here’s a tableau I witnessed at the Spectator summer party in July 1992. I arrived just as a car drew up amid a cascade of paparazzi flashes; the former prime minister, dressed to the nines, stepped out and was greeted by a phalanx of adoring young fogeys with Simon Heffer at the fore. I recall thinking I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had laid down his immaculate linen jacket for her to tread on. For one surreal moment, in the crammed entrance corridor, I found myself bosom-to-bosom with Thatcher, looking into her blue eyes (which didn’t alight on me) and imbibing the heady cocktail of fame, glamour and mythology still in the making.

That, however, wasn’t the first time I registered Thatcher’s erotic allure. This happened earlier, in 1988, when a friend from university invited me to join her family for a country walk. Her charming father was Peter Snow, renowned for Newsnight’s election night “swingometer”. At some point in the conversation he made reference to the PM’s sex appeal, which his daughter and I — with all the callowness of youth — found impossible to countenance. How could the 60-something villainess of the Poll Tax, with her roller-set hair and pussy-bow blouses, possibly be seductive?

Nearly four decades later, I realize Snow was just one in a sizeable cohort of media men who — if not all ardent admirers — couldn’t help but relish the way Thatcher deployed her femininity (rather as many media men and politicos now battle inconvenient attraction to Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni). Peter’s cousin, Jon Snow, said of encounters with the Tory PM, “she enjoyed being a woman and I enjoyed being a man”. John Sergeant, the BBC’s former chief political correspondent, admitted on Michael Parkinson’s chat show in 2005 that Thatcher “could be… sexy, almost”. He explained that it was “unusual” in the Eighties “for a prime minister, or powerful woman of any sort, to put her hand on your arm and she could do that to devastating effect. And I would tend to weaken, I must admit.”

Thatcher’s allure was carefully cultivated, as Gaudoin’s book reveals. Childhood letters to her older sister Muriel reveal a passion for cinema, but also for clothes and quality lingerie. I hadn’t anticipated quite so much bra shopping. There’s even a moment on a trip via London when teenage Margaret fibs to her parents about the day’s trajectory and absconds to Bond Street.

Over the years, Thatcher’s love of fashion and finery was honed for strategic effect. When she won the Tory nomination for Finchley in 1959, an Evening Standard headline blazed: “Tories Choose Beauty.” She would go on to appear in Vogue four times. One fascinating example of Thatcher maximizing personal effect is the private deportment classes she took from Laurence Olivier, arranged by her speech writer Ronald Millar. She was advised by the thespian to take long confident strides, and to use her eyes to seduce and flirt.

Thatcher’s use of fashion as a seductive power ploy became even more effective when she took on Margaret King as a personal stylist. The Aquascutum director sharpened Thatcher’s look for a state visit to Russia in 1987, as a guest of Mikhail Gorbachev. Gaudoin describes King’s vision for Thatcher as “a kind of Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago meets Sigourney Weaver as the boss in Working Girl”. The PM even wore a Lara-style fur hat. So successful was the Moscow visit that the Mirror ran a photo hoax on the next April Fool’s Day, using Thatcher and Gorbachev lookalikes cuddling up to one another in Gorky Park. Many readers fell for it.

Prime-ministerial tendresses appear to have cropped up all over. The Australian CEO and diplomat Sandy Holloway recalled attending a private Downing Street dinner for Australian leader Bob Hawke, and sitting next to Neil Kinnock who said, “You just watch how Margaret flirts with Bob.” Although, of course, that was a mere flicker compared to the flame that developed between Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Charles Moore once said that, “She had a sort of, it sounds a bit explicit to say, a sexual attraction” to the US president. It’s just as well Nancy and Denis got on too, so no one was left feeling too much of a wallflower. But the Reagan pash lends weight to Kinnock’s observation: “All of Margaret Thatcher’s favorite men and those she promoted, sometimes way beyond their abilities, looked as though they’d walked out of a 1950s B-movie.”

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Gaudoin takes Kinnock to task in the book for oversimplifying Thatcher’s predilections. She agrees the PM appreciated good-looking men. But argues that “she also liked men who flattered, and those with brains, tenacity and, to put it bluntly, balls”. The chevaliers and stalwarts are there, like Airey Neave, Robin Butler and Willie Whitelaw, who inspired her immortal line “every prime minister needs a Willie”. But there’s a more fun list of bounders: Cecil Parkinson, Jeffrey Archer, Alan Clarke, Jonathan Aitken and PR advisor Tim Bell (who boasted about putting his hand on the PM’s knee). It’s worth noting that the supposedly devout Methodist PM readily overlooked her favorites’ peccadilloes; perhaps because, in some part of her brain formed by wartime movies, she was swooning in their arms too.

Conservative women MPs didn’t enjoy the same leeway as the chaps with Thatcher. Those who succeeded — Virginia Bottomley, Edwina Currie and Gillian Shephard — did so for many of the same reasons she had: talent, graft, good hair, and persuading constituencies that they were good political housekeepers. Thatcher was never a “sister” and wasn’t even all that sisterly to Muriel, who she once alluded to in the past tense while still alive. Gaudoin makes it clear that it was the leader’s forward-propulsion and sense she was any man’s equal that rendered her an “incidental” feminist. In his 1990 TV interview with Thatcher, Terry Wogan says of male media interrogators: “They don’t seem to make any concession to the fact you’re a woman.” Thatcher flashes back at Wogan — another favorite — “Why should they? I don’t make any concession to the fact that they’re men.”

Notably, the one man who didn’t seem to attract Thatcher much at first was Denis Thatcher. Both Charles Moore and Gaudoin deduced from the Muriel letters that 20-something Margaret’s preferred suitor was a medical superintendent twice her age, Robert Henderson, inventor of the iron lung. There’s a tantalizing mention of an overnight stay with Roberts at a hotel in Eastbourne, but no indication of similar intimacy with poor, patient Denis who she was running alongside the medic. Then Henderson suddenly disappears from the correspondence and Margaret Roberts marries the man whose loyal support — and money — would allow her to fulfill her political ambitions.

It strikes me now that this long, stable, unsexy but mutually supportive marriage may, in itself, have contributed to Thatcher’s erotic glamour. For certain individuals, there are few things quite as tantalizing as an attractive woman (or man) who is unavailable, but happy to deploy their sexual energy within safe boundaries. Denis gave her that freedom and perhaps took a little for himself. I was intrigued to learn via the book of his late-blossoming friendship with Marilyn Foreman, better known as Mandy Rice-Davies of the Profumo Affair.

In the end, Woodrow Wyatt speaks for all of Thatcher’s admirers, the overgrown schoolboys who doted on matron: “I was in love with her, yes, but I suppose in the best platonic manner because — well, she was a marvelous girl… her skin was glowing and she had very fine legs.” You can’t help suspecting that for all Thatcher’s political achievements, that gushing appreciation of her sexual charisma might be her preferred epitaph.

It took only 12 months, the life-span of a shrew, for a Labour landslide to transmute itself into a struggling government barely able to contain social cataclysm. If a country’s stability can be measured in the longevity of its leaders, then Britain remains in a period of near-revolutionary ferment. Who can say with confidence that Starmer, Britain’s sixth Prime Minister in a decade, will see out his full term, or even that his party will?

At the time of writing, with the Chancellor weeping on the front bench, and Starmer’s authority within his own party having followed his welfare reforms down the drain, the Labour government reeks of approaching death. Already almost as unpopular as the Conservative Party at its terminal nadir in government, Labour is in office without power, in helpless possession of a historic majority it cannot use and is unlikely ever to repeat.

Yet for all that Starmer is simply a dud, the Government’s root problem is structural rather than personal: any Labour replacement would suffer the same fate. All the recent character portraits released to mark his dismal anniversary, peering behind the hollow mask, are thus an exercise in futility. The reason Britain is cycling through prime ministers at an ever-increasing rate is due to a crisis of state legitimacy. Like later 19th-century Ireland, the effective governance of the country has now become impossible. The state’s legitimacy and reach are contested, neither oppression nor mollification are practicable, an amorphous nationalist revolt is brewing, and strategic shocks are appreciable on the horizon.

In an attempt to borrow the legitimacy of existential threat, the state warns darkly of an approaching war it is not equipped to fight, in defence of a political order no one would willingly fight for. The country is simply in no state to fight a war. According to Westminster’s own newly announced commission on social cohesion, the UK is now a “tinderbox” of “creeping balkanisation and extremism” in which “the basis of our democracy is at risk”. Yet as the commission itself laments, “We do not have a national era-shaping presidential figure such as Lee Kuan Yew or Charles de Gaulle” to remake the faltering state. What we have, for now, is Keir Starmer.

One highly probable outcome of the current crisis, according to the New Statesman’s Tom McTague, is that Starmer “will be remembered as the last leader of the old normal, the final defender of the shaky post-2008 world before it was dragged into a new state by the figures now jockeying for mastery of the populist right”. Yet whatever the contours of the new state, the Westminster state, in its current ailing form, is also a very recent one: the proof of this is that even a return to the Britain of John Major would be experienced as a political revolution, condemned as fascism by clients of the Blairite state. Blair’s New Labour effectively erected a new UK polity on Britain’s territory, a “New Britain” in his own words, to entirely reshape what had by the Nineties become a normal European nation state for a new globalised world order. Yet now that global order has collapsed, and the British state reshaped in its image lives on borrowed time.

The unintentional effect of Blair’s demographic and constitutional tinkering was to set in train a second, later counterrevolution on the Right, understood by its opponents as a Right-wing populism of base urges, rather than a logical and entirely predictable political reaction. The current political trends on the Right are most closely analogous to the classical nationalisms of the 19th and 20th centuries, one of the essential stages of political modernity which Britain, through its possession of an early unified state and global empire, had previously sidestepped. Once you accept the analogy with classical nationalism, you see its hallmarks everywhere. The increasing co-option of the Conservative Party and its allied media and thinktanks by the New Right follows precisely the same process of “blocked mobility”, producing a revolutionary counter-elite among disaffected graduates that the scholar John Hutchinson traced in his works on cultural nationalism. In this regard, we may note that the current UK state’s proscription of “cultural nationalism” as a threat to its survival is entirely rational. Late 19th-century Ireland is one useful parallel, but others are available, as the relationship follows a well-worn historical path. In his 1994 book Modern Nationalism, Hutchinson summarised the process by which the ethnic Russians of the Soviet Union lost faith in their state, and by withdrawing its legitimacy, allowed it to collapse.

Like his contemporary Blair, Gorbachev aimed to reshape his ailing state for the brave new world of the Nineties. Instead, he accelerated its collapse. Following his failed reforms, ethnic Russians “came to believe themselves victims of a failed system… declining in world prestige and economically incompetent” in which the heterogenous state built around their ethnic core instead appeared to be the engine of their demographic decline. Relative birth rates, of ethnic Russians and minorities, assumed new political importance as “concerns were expressed about demographic trends which were transforming them into a minority in the Union”, while a new flowering of overt anti-Russian sentiment among minorities heightened their alienation from the Soviet state. The growing centrality of demographic and cultural anxieties in an atmosphere of economic decline and paralysed political leadership accelerated a Russian “ambivalence that made them prepared in the end to desert the USSR in order to build a better future in their homelands. Divisions paralysed the state, paving the way for full collapse.” In 1986, Hutchinson reminds us, the Soviet leadership had declared the “national question” to be finally resolved: five years later, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.

How relevant is this scenario to the UK? Each day’s headlines now throw up correspondences, yet what is remarkable, and tragic, is how new these dynamics are. Writing in 1994, Hutchinson observed that there are a few “other multinational states where the core nationality exercises power through a civic rather than an ethnic identification”, with Britain being the prime example. Yet the Britain of the Nineties differed from the Soviet Union in that “the core nationality is much more dominant than were the Russians in the USSR (who had declined to barely 50 per cent of the total population) and there are many fewer minority nationalities to control”. The takeaway lesson, for Hutchinson, is that “even universalistic ideologies such as communism, possessing all the machinery of a modern technological state to achieve its aims, have ultimately to operate through ethnic core populations.” Indeed, “for a state to achieve stability… these cores must be demographically dominant and strongly identified with the state and its territories.” This social-scientific truism is increasingly the pivot of British politics.

Just as Gorbachev’s failed reforms accelerated processes which “encouraged many Russians to redefine the Soviet territory as alien and to identify the Russian territory as their homeland,” we see a similar process on the rapidly evolving British Right in distinguishing between the Britain of recent memory and its UK replacement. When even Tory grandees such as Lord Frost borrow the disparaging term “Yookay” from the internet Right to disparage what he defines as Blair’s “new country, an actual successor state to the old Great Britain [but] distinct from it”, we see a similar, explicit distinction being made as that between Russia and the USSR. The counterpoint to Blair’s UK, or YooKay — the two are, now, more or less interchangeable — is, as Frost observes, simply Britain.

Whether you welcome this development or fear it, British politics in its current tumultuous form, with all its increasingly radicalised and existential debates on immigration and demographics, on its history, social housing and the welfare state, and on the nature and boundaries of Britishness or Englishness, is inexplicable without accepting that the country has now entered this phase of political development. Almost every daily headline or “culture war” controversy strengthens this thesis, which requires a wilful blindness to ignore: indeed, it is now more vigorously heard in ordinary life, or seen in the comments of local news stories than it in the Westminster press. In rushing towards visions of civil war, social democrats such as Marr, just like his increasingly mainstream apocalyptic analogues on the Right, have skipped the more common and plausible political outcome of political pressures leading towards a reinvigorated, more tightly-defined nation state, as historically distinct in its own way as Eastern Europe’s transition from communism.

McTague’s portrait of Starmer as “the last leader of the old normal” may be better applied to Farage, a flawed politician seemingly destined to take on a daunting and unenviable historical role. When Farage can declare that “Those who try to demonise me could be in for a terrible shock once I’m gone. That’s why we say we believe that we are the last chance to restore confidence in the democratic system, to change things”, he is probably correct. Whether he is up to the challenge is doubtful. As its name suggests, the Reform Party can be understood as one of the last attempts of the old system — the UK state in its post-Blair form — to save itself. If the analogies with classical nationalism are valid, then the political horizon of interest is what comes after Reform’s likely failure in government, as some on the political Right increasingly make explicit. Rupert Lowe’s new cross-party venture, Restore Britain, is a more perfect summation of nationalist thinking.

As the most intellectually interesting politician on the Right, Robert Jenrick, declares, “The old order is collapsing — and its architects like Tony Blair are yesterday’s men and women… We live in a political interregnum” in which “we have no choice but to go advance, and embrace the new order that is coming.” Cynically or not, consciously or not, Jenrick is tapping into the ferment of nationalist ideas on the younger Right, as is a growing cohort of the Conservative Party under Badenoch’s hands-off leadership. We have entered a well-established and predictable historical process which is likely to reshape the British state entirely before it is done. Indeed, it is notable that one eyewitness observer of the transition from the Soviet Union to Russia, Dominic Cummings, has already himself transitioned from reformer to accelerationist. Others will surely follow: adapting the old Irish nationalist maxim, we can say that the UK’s crisis is Britain’s opportunity.

Yet despite the weakness of lobby journalists for vapid gossip, the individual personalities of Westminster politicians thrown up by the moment are in a sense irrelevant, making Starmer, the empty cipher, the perfect figure of our time. Like Starmer, buffeted by winds he cannot control, their positions are structural, created by the logic of events. Like us mere voters, the politicians of today and of the near future have been dragged into the slipstream of history, in a process they may not fully perceive and cannot fully control. To accurately outline the contours of the current crisis is one thing: but where it all leads, no-one can yet say.

In an ironic reversal of the Gorbachev situation, Trump is trying to turn a globalized, free-market America into a more controlled and locally-based economy. Like Gorbachev, Trump has gone so far as to translate that demand into harsh economic reality: stop importing things right now, or get crushed by tariffs. But the companies now expected to do their patriotic duty for Uncle Sam have absolutely no support from the state.

When push came to shove, Gorbachev didn’t really want much in the way of actual markets; he wanted all the market efficiency while still maintaining Soviet top-down control of the economy. Not able to handle the pull from these radically two different directions, the USSR economy broke apart, and soon the USSR itself went with it.

If Trump were on course to make his program work, he would be mimicking the way the Chinese government supports businesses that are affected by changes of policy. If the CCP were to decide that aluminum imports were suddenly unacceptable, companies using aluminum would be told where a new mine would be opened, which banks would lend capital to that project, which company would be in charge of construction, and when these companies would have to switch to being entirely domestically sourced. If they do not perform their patriotic duty, or if they actively harm the social stability of China, companies can indeed be destroyed or taken over by the state.

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But there is still a social contract there: a deal in which both parties have duties and responsibilities. Trump has now suddenly and violently duplicated all the duties that companies in China might have toward their country, but he has done nothing to assume any of the responsibilities of the Chinese state. The result is a halfway house of sorts; one that is likely to simply destroy much of the American business community unless there is an immediate change of course.

America needs reform — who inside the country would even deny it at this point? On a purely abstract level, there are very few Americans who would oppose the idea of their country rebuilding its manufacturing capacity. But the current execution is akin to trying to do a sharp fighter jet turn while flying a slow and fully laden passenger plane. Whether due to a lack of time, energy, or care, Trump’s reforms are all being made with the chainsaw rather than the scalpel. Reforming the government bureaucracy has turned into firing tens of thousands of workers almost at random, leading to many mistakes and more inefficiency rather than less. Reforming America’s structural trade deficits, on the other hand, now looks like a Khmer Rouge death march for companies that are even partly reliant on components or raw materials from abroad. If you’re an American manufacturer, you should just buy American bauxite from an American bauxite mine, and then send it to an American aluminum smelter. If you cannot (the US currently has no operational bauxite mining) and your business collapses, then that’s not Trump’s fault, that’s your fault.

The practical details here — the fact that it takes 20 years to build a mine, but you’re somehow supposed to have it ready in 48 hours — are treated like they basically do not matter. In this way, Trump’s reforms clearly go way too far: the things he is asking American industry to do cannot be done. You can’t just impose huge penalty fees on a system of trade that America depends on to get its food and medicine and electronics and expect it to work out, and the end result of this policy is likely to be empty shelves and shortages: yet another parody of the late-stage Soviet Union. The systems we depend on have become too complex for us mere mortals to grasp; Trump seemingly neither has the patience or inclination to even try to understand them before transforming them utterly.

When asked what he thought of the ongoing stock market crash as a result of his tariff announcement, Trump recently said that, while he didn’t like the market going down, sometimes you simply had to take “medicine”. The Gorbachev years had its own, similar term: the USSR was to be saved through the application of “shock therapy”. Trump’s “medicine” here is just an inversion of Gorbachev’s own mix of totalizing reform and lethal indecisiveness. It’s an interesting choice of words, nevertheless: most kinds of medicine are just as capable of killing as they are of healing, if administered at the wrong dosage or the wrong time. The Soviet Union learned that lesson the hard way in the Eighties; now it may just be America’s turn.

But changing American industry is actually only a part of what Trump now wants to accomplish. His surrogates are starting to talk about the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency as a problem in and of itself. By tariffing everyone at the same time, and essentially taking a sledgehammer to the entire global trading system, Trump could conceivably end the dollar’s reserve status fairly quickly. But this is a truly monumental change that would touch upon the life of every person on the planet. What the effects of doing that would be, though, nobody really knows.

Even more stunningly, Trump is also planning on upending the infrastructure of trade itself, even as he’s declaring a tariff war on the rest of the planet. In just over a week, the US is now set to implement an incredibly radical change: ships that are made in China, or belong to companies who own a ship made in China, will now have to pay large penalty fees whenever they dock at a port in America. Ostensibly, this money will be used to re-create an American shipping industry. There’s just one problem: that industry simply doesn’t exist at present, and more than half of all the world’s ships are now made inside China.

None of what I’ve said is in any way an argument that America shouldn’t have tariffs, or that it cannot be reformed. It is only to say that these tariffs will not do what they’re supposed to do, and that these reforms will end up pushing America toward the very dissolution that people are trying to avoid. But America is now so hopelessly stuck in negative polarization that making such an argument is almost impossible. Right now, people are either for Trump or against Trump, and no more nuance than that is really in demand. To be against Trump but for tariffs, or for Trump but against these tariffs in particular, is to piss into the wind. Towards the end, the USSR was similarly polarized: the ability to discuss things across the social divide slowly dwindled, until all you could do was to simply pick a side.

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Unfortunately for America, the part where everyone simply starts picking sides has only just begun. If one considers the issue of Trump’s 2 April tariffs in terms of American domestic politics, it’s clear that the way in which they are being handled is a constitutional ticking time bomb. According to the constitution, issues of tariffs and taxation belong to Congress, not to the president. Congress has delegated power over tariffs to the president, but this delegation of power was meant to handle emergencies. Trump is of course claiming that the chronic trade deficits of America constitutes a sort of global emergency, but the critical point here is that this argument sits at the razor’s edge of what is even reasonable. One could easily make the argument that by deciding — as a single individual! — to change the entire world economic order and impose massive new de facto taxation on Americans, Trump has now taken the step from being a duly-elected president to being a sovereign and unaccountable king. Ominously, there’s probably quite a few Americans who would be fine with that idea.

Equally ominously, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, recently made noises about how his state might want to simply negotiate a separate trade arrangement with Asian economies rather than go along with Trump’s plans for American autarky. What Newsom is saying here is in fact openly seditious and completely unconstitutional, but to many opponents of Trump, his ideas are now far from unthinkable or even undesirable. It probably doesn’t even need to be said that the issue of tariff nullification played a significant part in the lead-up to the American Civil War. In fact, Newsom’s loose talk actually shows us that there now exists a viable, well-ordered path toward some sort of breakup of America. During the height of the Covid crisis, the federal government essentially lost control over the states, which ended up forming various ad-hoc regional organizations to coordinate their responses. These ad-hoc organizations at the regional level aren’t regulated in the constitution and are probably quite illegal, but in the heat of the Covid panic, none of that seemed to matter.

If the end result of these various dramatic Trump reforms is to break parts of the American economy, the pressure on Newsom and other blue state governors to do something will become increasingly urgent. If that happens, then it is not at all unlikely that blue states will once again come together into ad-hoc “confederacies”, which will then coordinate their policies, and even set their own trade policy vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Sure, this would be completely illegal; sure, the founders of America wouldn’t like it at all. But what does that even matter when you can say the same thing about the mad king trying to wreck the global economy? Nobody thought the Soviet Union could break up either, until one day it simply did.

Once a young nation, America is now old. Once the home of optimism, America is now despondent. The 250th anniversary of the great American Revolution is just a year away, but who knows whether there’ll be anyone left in the mood to celebrate. There is actually a non-zero chance the entire country might be in some form of bankruptcy or technical default on its debt before then; in fact, all of Trump’s reforms up until this point have only made the deficit situation worse, not better.

Given all this gloom, it is hard to fault Trump for flipping over the table. But in doing so, he’s not truly treading new ground. Today, just as happened a generation ago, a controversial man is suddenly upending an imperial system that has become too slow, too divided, and too indebted to survive for much longer. Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it — and Donald J. Trump has never been a man to care much about dusty old books.

Putin’s first, modest speeches were shaped for Western applause. He suggested Russia might join Nato. He embraced the freedoms of the media and speech. He gave a book length interview where he revealed that he had, under his mother’s influence from 1993, embraced Orthodox Christianity. In his first inauguration speech, in May 2000, he said, “the path to a free society was not simple and easy: in our history there have been tragic and bright pages. The construction of a democratic state is far from complete, but much has already been done.”

The façade which he and his aides had constructed during these first months soon crumbled. The rackety, already corrupt and incomplete democracy Putin inherited has, in the 22 years since that speech, been undone. Among the most shocking, tragic acts of undoing came last month, a little before Christmas: the central offices of Memorial, a human rights group, were closed.

Memorial was founded, in the dying years of the Soviet Union, by Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear scientist and human rights activist and the historian Arseny Roginsky. Sakharov had been released from internal exile by Mikhail Gorbachev; Roginsky was once imprisoned for publishing a document named “Memory” — a doomed effort to hold the mass incarcerations of the Stalinist period to account. Memorial took on Roginsky’s lone work. It had research offices in the main camp zones. It was backed by large support from abroad and researchers devoted to often savage discoveries. Memorial would diligently publicise their findings.

While a reporter in Moscow, I flew, in the early winter of 1992, to Vorkuta in the Arctic Circle to report on the campaign for the coming parliamentary elections of Yegor Gaidar, the prime minister. Vorkuta had been built in the early Thirties to be the administrative hub for a network of camps, whose prisoners dug coal from anthracite mines. Gaidar had been booked to give a speech in the town’s cultural centre. The town council organised a good show by local dancers, musicians, actors and singers. When the small, tubby prime minister came on stage, he was given a cheer — a reception which soured quickly. Gaidar, a brave and principled man, spoke of the town’s past as a centre for oppression. Scattered at first, then louder, came the hisses and boos. When Gaidar left, I struggled to get near him because of the crush of people angrily mobbing him, his security detail ploughing their way through.

It was the first time I had seen how much the invoking of the past as a horror struck people as an insult. These citizens — who had a tough life in that freezing city, which is now rapidly becoming a ghost town — wanted a sense that they and their parents and grandparents, who had staffed the city-prison, had honour. Gaidar was impugning it.

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By closing Memorial, Putin will, for a substantial number of Russians, gain rather than lose points, as he and his advisors must have calculated. Yet does this mean — as many commentators, Russian and foreign, now believe — that the suppression of an institute dedicated to exhuming the truth foreshadows a descent into a state comparable to Nazism, or Stalinism in the Thirties?

I do not believe so.

Hitler and Stalin advertised themselves, from the beginning, as tyrants. Tyrants in a noble cause, they believed. Tyrants of necessity, who would lead their people though sacrifice into societies of freedom and plenty, underpinned by ideologies and force which removed enemies. Putin came in as an awkward democrat and progressed, by degrees, into a fitful authoritarian, finding his mission not before but as he ruled — a mission to reconstitute as much of the lost Soviet Union as was possible. And among many — though they tend to be the older generations — that’s a fine ambition. Not for so many of the young.

Putin isn’t popular with the rising generation. Polls by the Levada Institute in February and October last year show that nearly half of 18-24 year olds disapprove of the President’s performance, and only one third wish him to be re-elected. An essay by the commentator Andrei Kolesnikov last month, based on polls by the Carnegie Institute, detailed a strong aversion to a war with Ukraine, and a positive view of the country by two thirds of the 18-24 year olds. Putin doesn’t have the force, the ideology or, likely, the stomach for mass repression, once wide-scale protests begin over a bloody war with the nearest neighbour.

This isn’t the Thirties. Then, throughout the industrialised world, the globalisation of the early 20th century had failed. Depression ruled. Now globalisation is unavoidable. Russia is ill-equipped to benefit properly from it, since its feeble attempts at industrial modernisation have yielded little. But it is energy rich: it is crucial to keeping much of Europe, especially Germany, supplied with light and heat. Its elite, many of the members corruptly enriched by the Putin presidency, wish to be able to spend their money in Europe, North America and the Caribbean. When Stalin was dictator he possessed an ideology that could be used to excuse the hideous consequences of his rule. Putin’s corruption, dependent on international cooperation from tax havens and the City of London, is more limited in scale.

Russia’s ever-closer relations with China also impose limits on Putin. In Stalin’s day, the Soviet Union was the inspiring model, the “big brother”, for Mao Tse Tung; now China has assumed the big brother role. The CCP, learning from the sight of Gorbachev giving the basis of communism away, has kept its ability to inspire fear, identify and suppress its enemies — presently, the Uighurs. Nevertheless, even more than for Russia, globalisation is the lifeblood of communism with Chinese characteristics. China seeks to acquire at least equal status with the United States, but not to destroy it, whether through ideology or war. It, too, has limits, and will enforce them on little brother.

What options for containment are available to the West, beyond registering revulsion at the closure of a great institution such as Memorial? The looming possibility of an invasion of Ukraine sharpens the question.

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The answer is mostly obvious. It is to recognise the nature of the Russian (and Chinese) regimes, dedicated to covert subversion in Western states — and to strengthen democracies against them. In part this is military, where the US remains unparalleled and where Nato leaders last week, according to the New York Times’ Steven Erlanger, “spoke, in talks with the Russians, with exceptional unity for a 30-member alliance whose commitment to collective defence was increasingly in question”. Erlanger quoted Anna Wieslander, chair of Sweden’s Institute for Security and Development, as saying that “Deterring Russia is in the DNA of Nato because Russia is what can bring existential threats to European nations”. Sweden, like Finland, is not a Nato member, but both the Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson and the Finnish Premier Sauli Niinistö have recently indicated that they might now argue for membership. Putin’s threats have caused Nato’s popularity to surge — not, presumably, what he wished for.

As important as military strength is the renewal of our ideology, which is based on freedom, and depends on states with democratic politics which foster civil society. The Democracy Summit, hosted by President Joe Biden in December, was encouraging: as was his earlier recognition that democracy “doesn’t happen by accident: we have to defend it, fight for it, strengthen it, renew it”. Renewing it, above all, by elevating the fight against corruption to being a constant theme in politics and in the media. Without this struggle, Western societies, where the majority of people are just getting by, will continue to fragment. Civic life in a democracy must be exemplary. Democracy and freedom certainly don’t happen by accident — and they aren’t sustained by being taken for granted.

Putin’s Russia warns of what happens when corruption goes unchecked. Memorial was dedicated to revealing the tragedies of history, and for that Putin’s government considered it a threat and an outrage. The state’s prosecutor charged them with being “traitors to the motherland and Nazi collaborators” — a grimly ironic reversion to the Stalinist language of the past. Such lies can only be the product of fragility, and fear. The Russian government knows that a generation is growing full of men and women intolerant of a state fashioned to make authoritarian leaders rich, and history what Vladimir Putin says it is.

In August 1991, while the USSR’s reforming General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev holidayed in his Ukrainian dacha, a group of hard-liners seized power. Gorbachev, under house arrest, turned to the BBC to find out what was going on, since in the Soviet Union nothing the media said was true unless the party said so. He learned that, in the centre of Moscow, Russian Federation president Boris Yeltsin courageously stood in front of the city’s White House in defiance of the plotters, surrounded by supporters brandishing the old Russian flag.

Perhaps what wasn’t clear to everyone was that Yeltsin was drunk for much of it. The true extent of his alcoholism became more apparent in the years after he dissolved the communist state a few months later and became president of an independent Russia, although he already had a colourful reputation for drink-related antics.

The plotters, it turned out, were also mostly legless. Having began a cack-handed coup that they weren’t prepared to kill for, the ringleaders appeared on television looking ashen-faced, some shaking nervously, their insides rotting from vodka. Most of all, though, they just appeared old, old and old beyond their years, the face of a fading empire based on a faith no one really believed in anymore.

By this stage, the Soviet Union was itself dying of alcohol, and attempts to treat it proved fruitless. One of the biggest mistakes made by Gorbachev — a very moderate drinker, which is why he’s alive and his rival Yeltsin is long dead — was to raise the tax on vodka, as part of a drive to tackle the country’s catastrophic problem with drink. Russian humour is famously bleak and sharp, and this led to a joke in which a boy asks, “Papa, and this means that you shall drink less?” “No, son, this means that you shall eat less”.

Alcohol played a central part in the demographic collapse that pre-empted the political fall of the USSR. It was back in the Seventies that people first noticed that in the Soviet Union people were starting to die younger. The decline in life expectancy affected not only the old, but the middle-aged. There was no famine, no foreign invasion, no natural disaster; instead people were drinking themselves to death out of despair. A country in which life is getting shorter — and worse — for its citizens has no future.

Russia’s birth rate had long collapsed, too. Two things drive higher fertility in wealthy countries — religion and affordability. All the major religions promote childbearing, give prestige and status to women who have children, and men who stick around; on top of that, attending a church, mosque or synagogue is associated with a number of measures of wellbeing that breed optimism.

The second factor is money. If both partners in a couple must work in order to survive, fertility is going to be severely depressed. The Soviet Union had extensive day care provision for mothers, but it was nowhere near enough to make up for the shortfall caused by mediocre wages. Back in the 1970s, Russian women marvelled at how their American equivalents could afford to leave work while they had children. As the New York Times reported, they “express astonishment when they learn that an American father can support a family of two, three or four children without his wife’s working. Many are also surprised that American women would willingly have more than one child.” For them, it was a huge struggle to raise just one.

The Soviet Union’s main adversary in the Cold War was also defined by ideology, to some extent. Many western nations had embraced liberalism, but no other was created with the words of John Locke enshrined in its foundation. Yet liberalism, too, faced its challenges in the late 20th century, not from the obviously failing Soviet Communism, but from rival ideas within the democratic tradition. Starting in the 1960s, a new way of thinking began to predominate in the US that was not really liberal, although its opponents confusingly still referred to it as such.

This new way of thinking was more hostile to freedom of speech, and its adherents began the process of chasing deviant thinkers out of academia that began in the late 1960s and would massively reduce political diversity by the 21st century; it supported not just personal sexual freedom, as did liberalism, but radical ideas about sex, including hostility to the family; it was anti-religion and would become more so when religion clashed with sexual rights. As for freedom of association, the “master freedom” in Christopher Caldwell’s words, this was also incompatible with a worldview that prioritised equality over liberty.

This new way of thinking — progressivism is probably the fairest term — is far less tolerant than liberalism. Indeed, in its hostility to freedom of speech, its Manichean worldview, its suspicion that its opponents are fascists, and the belief that politics should be inserted into everything — from science to children’s books — it is closer to the totalitarian tradition. American progressivism is not communism, obviously, anymore than its opponents are Nazis; the market is perfectly capable of achieving most progressive goals, and America has become more culturally Left-wing as Right-wing economic policies have dominated, globalisation being the common theme that links the two.

But globalisation came with a price, with millions of jobs lost after the 2001 trade deal with China, made two months after George W. Bush had followed the Soviet example by invading Afghanistan. It was in those former industrial heartlands where people first began to notice an epidemic of drug-related deaths that now constitutes one of the greatest social disasters in history.

Four decades on from its superpower rival, the United States had now become a country in which people were dying younger, driven by overdoses and suicides. That this epidemic took so long to register may have been the solitary and often legal nature of the drug problem; unlike Aids, it did not affect too many celebrities, Prince being the exception. But it could also be who the victims were — predominantly rural white Americans, neither powerful themselves nor championed by powerful supporters.

Like the Soviet Union, the United States has developed a system in which some social classes and races are officially favoured, and some are disfavoured, reflected in post-war legal innovations like affirmative action.

Affirmative action was originally introduced as a counter-measure to segregation, either of the official or unofficial variety, but as with many things its purpose evolved as bureaucracies grew. Today, government interference in private institutions is aimed at the goal of equality — not the liberal concept of equality of opportunity, but the more ambitious equality of outcomes, or “equity”.

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Under this theory, each racial group should have equal representation in elite institutions, which means that, depending on their race, Americans must achieve different scores to attend certain colleges. Equality is achieved through inequality. If this sounds illiberal, indeed un-American, that is because it is not unlike the “nationalities policies” created by communist revolutionaries, and under which the Russian majority were officially discriminated against in certain positions.

The Soviet nationalities policies allowed minority groups a certain degree of self-rule and recognition, while also ensuring that their elites remained utterly under the control of the party. Sometimes other nationalities would be disfavoured because they were seen as too anti-communist or otherwise disloyal, as happened to Ukrainians, Tartars and Jews at different times, but only Russian identity was actively discouraged. Stalin condemned the “Great Russian chauvinist spirit” and the Soviet Union saw majority nationalism as by far the greater evil.

This did not lead to a brotherhood of man, amazingly. The ethnic spoils system benefited the party, and minority members within it especially, but it is also a zero-sum game. The benefits of diversity, like the benefits of liberalism and capitalism, are supposed to be non-zero-sum, and often are: migrants benefit from moving to a richer or safer country, but the host population gains from their skills or cultural niches. When your migrant neighbour gets rich — and even richer than you — not only will it not harm you but you may well benefit.

Equity is similarly a zero-sum game: someone has to lose, and if one group is feted, in some cases even sacrilised, then others have to suffer, whether with tangible matters like college places or simply status and prestige.

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Today America’s thought-leaders are obsessed with white nationalism and regularly denounce white supremacy as a lethal danger to the nation, in what is probably history’s least ever white supremacist country; a country in which the majority  is officially discriminated against by certain institutions, and where membership of the group is considered so tainted and wicked that the media has regular denunciations of whiteness, and where numerous people avoid this taint by faking their ethnic origins.

There are other resemblances to the older empire. At the heart of Soviet thinking was the blank slate, the idea that life outcomes are determined entirely, or almost entirely, by social forces rather than genes. As Mao said of the peasantry, “a clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it”.

Likewise, American progressivism today is entirely built on the blank slate, and as in the USSR, where belief in Mendelian genetics led to internal exile, American social scientists offering any sort of genetic explanation for outcomes face ostracism. Privately, lots of people will agree, but they’ll lose their job if they speak out, or their publisher will drop them, or it will only embolden the party’s enemies and harm the noble goals of progressivism.

Communists saw their political beliefs as so all-encompassing that even science was political: if science contradicted the goals of communism, it wasn’t science. In today’s United States the slow death of liberalism has resulted in the blatant politicisation of science, to the extent that as in Russia, scientists teach things which are obviously untrue because it supports the prevailing ideology. Then there is the media, much of which parrots the party line with almost embarrassing, “Comrade Stalin has driven pig iron to record production” levels of conformity. Once again, if you want to hear the truth, go to the BBC (until the young people who run the website take over).

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America, once the most trusting of societies, is heading in the direction of Russia, one of the least trusting. Most disturbing of all is that, formerly the most demographically vibrant of western countries, today the United States has suffered a spectacular collapse in fertility. This is mostly down to stagnant wages among the middle class, who can no longer afford a family with one breadwinner, and a rapid decline of religious faith. But maybe people have also lost belief in themselves, and the ideals of their country.

The Soviet Union broke into 15 different pieces, and the transition was, as CNN might put it, mostly peaceful — although Gorbachev’s old dacha is now in Russia once again after some local unpleasantness.

Today it is the United States where people talk of secession, escaping a crumbling superpower ruled by geriatrics. This seems very unlikely to happen, more clickbait than reality, because why would you leave what has been for more than two centuries the richest, most impressive state on earth? But then a generation ago few would have foreseen the Soviet Union crumbling in a haze of alcoholic despair.

Brezhnev gave up the ghost in 1982, although he had been rehearsing for death for at least half a decade prior; not even the Soviet propaganda machine could cover up his obvious physical and mental decrepitude as he slurred his way through speeches on state TV. His successor, Yuri Andropov, had once been a vigorous crusher of dissent both at home and abroad, but by the time he got the top job he was already dying from kidney disease and kicked the collective farm-bucket a mere 15 months later.

Next came Konstantin Chernenko, a man so unwell he had to dress up his hospital room to make it look like an office. He barely lasted a year before leaving for the great Communist Party Congress in the sky. By this point the increasingly rickety Politburo finally accepted it was time to hand power to someone who was not teetering on the brink of death. And so it was that Mikhail Gorbachev, who at a sprightly 54 years old was their youngest member, took over.

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Yet as much as people still like to crack wise about Soviet gerontocrats, it is a little-recognised fact that most of those seemingly ancient communists were actually younger than America’s political leadership is now. Brezhnev was in his late 50s when he became leader and 75 when he died; Andropov was 69 when he died, and Chernenko was 73 when he shuffled off this mortal coil. At 74, Trump has already outlived them all bar Brezhnev, while Biden, who will turn 78 in November, is almost a decade older than Andropov was when he breathed his last.

And that’s just the presidential candidates. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the house and third in line to the presidency, is 80 years old; she graduated from college the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is 78; he got his first job in politics while LBJ was still in office. Meanwhile, Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the senate judiciary committee, is 87; she was already two years into her university studies when Stalin died, and is a mere two years younger than Gorbachev is now.

And it’s not as if this is a new phenomenon; in the past, there were politicians who were still in office at even greater ages. When I moved to the states in 2006 there was a hearty old fellow in the senate by the name of Robert Byrd; he was so old he could remember when it was cool for Democrats to run around in white hoods. This jolly ex-Klansman died in office in 2010 at the age of 92. Strom Thurmond, another long-serving Democrat with a youthful enthusiasm for racism, made it to the age of 100 before expiring in office in 2003, at which point his corpse was eulogised by none other than Joe Biden (back then a mere stripling of 61).

And this is to say nothing of the Supreme Court, where the justices are appointed for life and enjoy the kind of job security granted only to the likes of Xi Jinping — although even he had to organise a vote to have his term limits removed.

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No doubt the high-functioning state of America’s elderly politicians is a testament to the invigorating effects of sustained exposure to money and power and E-Z access to super-expensive, high quality healthcare (there’s your fountain of youth right here). But then again, given that America is often pilloried for its obsession with youth and beauty, is it not reassuring — a sign of maturity, even — that the people elect only the most experienced politicians to govern? Many cultures revere the wisdom that comes with age; in The Republic, Plato states that “it is obvious” that “the elder must govern, and the younger be governed.” The very word “senate” has the same root as “senex” and refers to a council of elders. Thus, the US version (average age 62.9) embodies the vision of the Roman original that was established some 2,500 or so years ago.

Meanwhile, I am suspicious of the weasel wording of “cognitive decline” that was sometimes tossed around by commentators during the primaries, especially when they wished that the likes of Biden or Bernie Sanders (also 78) would make way for their preferred candidate, such as the 71-years-young Elizabeth Warren. These same people would no doubt have been outraged had the same argument been applied to the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg (still getting her law on right up until she died at the age of 87).

And consider Nelson Mandela: he was 75 when he entered office and 81 when he retired. Did the fact that Jacob Zuma was a bit younger make him “cognitively more awesome” (I believe that’s the scientific term)? Or, to take an example from outside politics: Clint Eastwood is 90 and Michael Bay is 55. But even the most tedious late period Clint Eastwood movie is cognitively superior to Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Age may not be just a number, but it’s certainly not a disqualifier either.

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Yes, I would happily be governed by a council of wise elders if I could be certain that they really were the wisest folk going — which brings us back to Plato. He was not in favour of rule by any old greybeard; he did not assume that merely by growing old, you become wise. In The Republic he adds that “those who govern must be the best of them.” And therein lies the rub. All too often, age does not bring wisdom, and perhaps those who actively seek power over others are among those least likely to develop wisdom.

In the USSR, the leadership instead grew sclerotic and decrepit and fearful of change, condemning the state (and its people) to a long stagnation that ultimately ended with the collapse of the whole shebang. As for America’s political elites, with Congress’ approval rating sitting at a lowly 17% the consensus appears to be that this council of elders is not only not wise, they’re not even all that competent.

The Trump-Biden debate was reminiscent of the old “that’s you, that is” Newman and Baddiel skit in which two cranky historians would lob a series of increasingly childish insults at each other, only not as funny. The sight of Nancy Pelosi tearing up the State of the Union address behind Trump’s back was petulant and juvenile, cool only in the eyes of those deranged by Orange Man Bad syndrome or seeking to profit from the US media’s fear-and-hatred-for-clicks business model.

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I also suspect that having the same people stick around for decades, pickled in their contempt for each other, may have something to do with the endless deadlock we see in American politics. Let us not underestimate the sheer, soul-crushing awfulness of turning up for work, day after day, year after year, only to squabble with the same people over and over and over again. There are no surprise maneuvers, no hitherto unknown tricks to be learned. Just the same opponent, making the same irritating moves endlessly until — quite literally — death.

In every other field of endeavour, whether it be business or the arts, it is held as a truism that it’s good to bring in new eyes, new perspectives, lest stagnation kicks in. Even if it doesn’t work out, a new generation could at least start again in the naïve hope that they might be able to work together and strike a few compromises and become gradually disillusioned over time. America’s elite politicians were disillusioned with each other decades ago; some have been hating each other since Nixon was in power.

Alas, power, and the mysterious habit American politicians have of getting really rich (or richer still) once in office makes it hard for them to let go. And in the absence of term limits for everyone but the president, they don’t even have to do a Putin and organise a weird referendum to justify their continued presence in our lives. They can just stick around for as long as their constituents keep reelecting them. And they do: again and again and again.

Gorbachev is widely reviled in today’s Russia for, as many see it, destroying the Soviet Union and their country’s status as a great power. It may take another generation before Russians regard him, if they ever do, through a more charitable lens, as the heroic figure who facilitated the end of communism and accelerated the demise of the Soviet bloc in such a way that these momentous transformations took place largely without bloodshed.

So much for the nostalgia. What about the unexpected timewarp? The surprise was less at how Gorbachev has aged — it is 30 years, after all; the early death of his beloved Raisa (in 1999) hit him hard, he is diabetic, and he has had spells in hospital with heart problems. It was more that, when Gorbachev voiced his fears for today, his apprehensions seemed framed by quite a different world, the world of then rather than now. Asked about contemporary dangers to world peace, he replied: “As long as weapons of mass destruction exist, primarily nuclear weapons, it’s a colossal danger.” Repeating a theme from his earliest summits with Reagan, he declared: “All nuclear weapons should be destroyed, to save ourselves and the planet.”

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His prism remains that of East-West relations, the bipolar world that ended with the Soviet collapse, and the premise of Mutual Assured Destruction that underlay the string of arms control treaties concluded by the United States and the Soviet Union. Then, these treaties were hailed as guarantees of security for both countries and the European states in between. Now, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), renounced by the United States in 2002, the Intermediate-range Nuclear forces Treaty (1987), which the US withdrew from after citing violations by Russia, and the latest Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (2010), which expires early in 2021, are passing successively into abeyance without being either renewed or replaced.

Is the world a more dangerous place because of that? Some would say it is, and blame Donald Trump for trifling with global security and abandoning the responsibilities of the United States as world policeman. Could it be, though, that the apparent lack of urgency to negotiate updated agreements is less a reflection of the US President’s brand of isolationism than evidence of how the world, and the perception of major threats, have changed since those years? Is codified arms control, including nuclear arms control, simply less significant than it was,  at least in the bilateral form it then took?

The tentative answer to this has to be yes — and it is one reason why Gorbachev’s anniversary observations marking the fall of the Berlin Wall sound so dated. The concerns of today, which may themselves be hopelessly obsolete in far less than 30 years’ time, are very different from those that derived from the East-West divide then.

How different became apparent when I took part in a discussion at the annual debating festival, the Battle of Ideas last weekend, entitled “Can we stop World War III?”.  Our panel put forward a range of views, but almost entirely absent — either from the presentations or from questions — were the following: any suggestion that World War Three would be waged between East and West in the old Cold War sense; arms control treaties, including nuclear weapons treaties; and even — strange though it might seem in the light of Washington’s recent preoccupations — Russia.

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The biggest difference between then and now is the focus on China, and the prospect of an eventual conflict with the United States, as the one power rises and the other — perhaps — declines. Thirty years ago, China was nowhere as a global player. It was isolated after after its leaders had crushed the democracy movement at Tiananmen Square; it was not projecting its power any further afield. Even now, it is reasonable to question how sure and steady China’s continued rise will be. It faces economic and demographic difficulties, the Communist Party has not relinquished — or been forced to relinquish — power. Internal turmoil cannot be excluded.

But the US and its neighbours are already uneasy about possible plans Beijing may have to control the South China Sea, and there is a fresh interest in maritime power. Perhaps those two British aircraft carriers some dismissed as a vanity project are not such an irrelevance after all. There is also much about China, from mass surveillance to the treatment of its non-Han ethnic groups, to the way it acquires other people’s technology, that could spell dangers, even confrontation, ahead. Hong Kong today has become a front-line of sorts, where one system is confronting another, but the imbalance in power between the two sides suggest that, if it escalates further, it will be settled only one way.

Then again, the whole nature of warfare is changing. There is no sign that regional conflicts will cease but whether they could escalate into a world war, however, is another matter. If you consider the existing or likely flashpoints of today — the greater Middle East, Kashmir, the Korean Peninsula — only Syria has come near to becoming a proxy conflict on the Cold War model and it is winding down. US self-sufficiency in energy has radically altered its calculation of risk when considering military engagement, even of a relatively limited kind.

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Will the next world war — if there is one — even be about territory at all, or control? Will it entail physical combat? It is not necessary to make prophecies about Artificial Intelligence to conceive of conflicts conducted remotedly, wars waged by cyber threats to critical infrastructure and weapon systems that require no human intervention.

This is why Mikhail Gorbachev sounds as though he lives in another world when he calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons worldwide as his prescription for world peace. Nuclear weapons still pose an existential threat, but the nuclear threat is now one among others, and deterrence may no longer be the only answer. If the US has the capability to sabotage other countries’ nuclear research and perhaps even their tests, that “smart” technological approach might achieve the same effect as developing your own nuclear weapon at vastly less cost.

International arms control treaties might not have completely outlived their usefulness. After all, they were never just about counting missiles and warheads. They were about establishing a framework of trust — which is one reason why they were seen as a useful start to trying to improve US-Russia relations whenever those relations soured. But the age of bilateral arms control has to be over. New arms negotiations might just foster a US-Russia rapprochement (though this looks unlikely before the next US election), but — as both the US and Russia quietly acknowledge, any serious arms control in future must include China.

In 30 years the world of international security has changed beyond all compare: geographically with the rise of China and the emergence of India and Pakistan as nuclear weapons states; technologically with the advent of cyber warfare, and philosophically with the evisceration of Soviet communism and threat from climate change. None of this was on the horizon when the Berlin Wall fell. A hero of his time, Mikhail Gorbachev’s anniversary call for the destruction of all nuclear weapons offers a salutary reminder of how far and fast the world has moved on.