History writing does not escape the history it attempts to reconstruct. The more pertinent question to ask is not how much time must pass before history can be written, but what has happened in the interim and what, at the time of writing, is expected to happen next. This book, for one, would have been easier to write and might be clearer in its conclusions if it had been finished even closer to the time of the events it begins by describing. It may be easier to write a book like this ten years from now, though given the current train of events, that may be unduly optimistic. Certainly, the
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