In light of the developing catastrophe in Ukraine, one wonders if President George W. Bush regrets not having taken a harder line against Russian President Vladimir Putin when he invaded Georgia in 2008. Or if President Barack Obama wishes he had tried harder to muster NATO and the rest of the free world to resist Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
But that’s the trouble with overused clichés such as “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” They sound surpassingly wise but, in practical terms, they don’t tell us very much about how we should behave now.
Often clichés such as these raise more questions than they answer. If Bush had resisted Putin in 2008 or Obama had in 2014, we do not know whether Russia would be currently residing quietly within its national boundaries or whether we would have already experienced World War III and would now be facing World War IV, the one that Einstein supposedly said would be “fought with sticks and stones.”
