There’s a “peculiar modern tendency” to describe things we don’t like as out-of-date, says Tom McTague in The Atlantic. The Taliban are medieval, Donald Trump supporters backward, Vladimir Putin a “Soviet throwback”. It’s nonsense. The Taliban is the product of “our globalised age of digital propaganda”; Trumpism is an expression of today’s America, not that of the 1950s. Similarly, Italy’s Cosa Nostra was dismissed for centuries as a feature of Sicily’s backwardness. Actually, the Mafia clan was a product of modernity, born from the enormous profits Sicily made exporting citrus fruits after the breakdown of the old feudal order. And when the EU arrived, the mobsters adapted, hijacking the bloc’s investment in the island.

There’s a simple reason why Germany is acting so meekly over Russia’s threats to Ukraine, says Marcel Dirsus on the US defence blog War on the Rocks: Germans “see the world differently” to the rest of the West. They think military force is both “evil” and “counterproductive”, responsible for the “greatest tragedies of the 20th century”. This is partly because they have no fear of being invaded themselves, as any foreign aggressor would first have to get through “another dozen countries”. But they also think “engagement” works much better than military deterrence. Ask Americans how the Cold War was won and they’ll mention nuclear weapons, money and troops. Ask Germans and they’ll cite Chancellor Willy Brandt’s strategy of “Ostpolitik”, which sought to achieve “change through rapprochement”. It’s no wonder nearly three-quarters of Germans oppose sending weapons to Ukraine.