However, Doyle begins with criticism of what he considers a lost opportunity, one whose effects are with us still. What Doyle shows especially well is that avoidable or not a new Cold War won’t be like the old one too much has changed. Of course some readers may well think that following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine we are already caught up in a new Cold War and not just with Russia but with China as well. He makes a sophisticated case but his book’s sub-title – “Avoiding a new Cold War” – suggests that without novel approaches another Cold War may be unavoidable. In Cold Peace, Michael Doyle suggests there is an alternative vista and that a new Cold War is not inevitable. What is different now is that, whereas the Soviet Union sought power through communist ideology, Putin’s Russia – at home and abroad – seeks power for its own sake and to sustain an assertive nationalism, an expansionist uniformity. The war in Ukraine is rekindling old divisions all too familiar to Kundera’s generation and which many had thought definitively left behind at the start of the 1990s. How could Central Europe not be horrified facing a Russia founded on the opposite principle: the smallest variety within the greatest space?” “Central Europe longed to be a condensed version of Europe made up of nations conceived according to one rule: the greatest variety within the smallest space.

Eloquent evenings website