Andrew Stuttaford on how the 21st century hasn’t turned out as the West had hoped:

As we have again been horribly reminded, the use of force and coercion to this end does have a place in the 21st century. However, faith in the notion that that sort of thing was behind us helps explain why some EU countries, notably Germany and Italy, became so dangerously dependent on Russian natural gas, even after the course on which Putin had embarked had already become all too evident. And, as I highlighted in a post on Wednesday, that dependency is not confined to gas, nor is it confined to the EU. The U.S. has also become overly reliant on Russia as a supplier of products — such as titanium used in aerospace manufacture or gases critical to chip production — in areas where it is extremely unwise to have done so (a dependence that will be increased if Russia controls Ukraine after the invasion).
In part, the U.S. was lulled into doing so on the back of a similarly deterministic view of history. It was nonsense from the start, and it should not have survived previous encounters with Russian reality. . . .

Read the whole thing here.