I think it was a combination of factors: technological progress caused by the industrial revolution making mass-slaughter on the battlefield an efficient possibility while nobody had developed a strategic response to that yet.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...join-forces-to-defeat-Islamic-terrorists.html The love affair between the kippers and the bare-chested strongman continues.
http://www.afp.com/en/node/3046366 and http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/11/us-ukraine-crisis-shelling-idUSKCN0IV19D20141111 and http://www.wsj.com/video/fighting-i...ths/E0C26FA0-6966-49C5-B9C4-6AED5D83C14C.html the Russian army has invaded Ukraine as NATO watched.
Well NATO was never going to go to war there no matter what Russia claimed. Perhaps we thought Putin wouldn't but he perhaps is not driven by this messianic nationalism and can't stop himself any more. All we can do now it deploy massively to the eastern NATO countries and supply the elected Ukrainian government with defensive weapons. They will have had much of their country stolen, of course. But ironically it means that Kiew will never now be Russian, and that will bother Putin. He can take it if he wants, but he won't be able to claim he is liberating anyone any more. I expect the fellow-travelers to be telling us that Ukraine didn't really have the right to exist (outside Russia's "near-abroad") soon. It is all a tragedy as after the fall of communism the west assumed we could just get on, given our common heritage, but Putin needs to stay in power in a world of falling oil prices and why should we ever have assumed that a KGB man would have given a dam about the interests of the Russian people (as opposed to the Russian state).
