That's all true for many younger people no doubt. However, as a history graduate it wasn't like I lacked the context. It was more that the necessary preconditio

That's all true for many younger people no doubt. However, as a history graduate it wasn't like I lacked the context. It was more that the necessary preconditions seemed absent in the present era. With regards to a wider global conflict, my expectation was that it could happen in the coming decades, possibly as a second order effect of climate change. It just seemed that, right now, the variables in the equation were wrong. We didn't reckon with Putin being this way though. He seemed like a difficult thorn in the side of the west, a belligerent and cunning autocrat, but I never saw him confronting Europe in this way. I think he's actually changed. This might be premeditated but I don't think this was his plan 20 years ago whatever anger he harboured towards the west back then.