Let’s cup our ear to some echoes from the past. Andrew Alexander, a journalist on the right- of-centre Daily Mail newspaper in the UK, recounted how his research for a book about the origins of the Cold War confounded his presuppositions: there had, in reality, been “no Soviet military threat”, and wrong-headed western assessments that one existed were responsible for “one of the most unnecessary conflicts of all time, and certainly the most perilous”.