One rubicon after another

"Developments in the world suddenly gain a terrible momentum; developments that would otherwise take centuries seem to flash by like fleeting phantoms within months and weeks and then be completed."

These lines could have been written yesterday, or last week, about Russia's war against Ukraine and the rapid geopolitical changes this has unleashed.

In fact, it was the 19th century Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt, a professor at the University of Basel, who noted this in