there is more to history than vast impersonal forces such as Communism, technology, geopolitics, and so on. There are also personalities and human agency, with all of their implied contingencies. Vladimir Putin has been the most dangerous Russian leader since Stalin; Xi Jinping is as relentless and ideological as Mao Zedong; Donald Trump, whose political career may lie in the past tense, is more vain and superficial than von Papen even.
