Photograph Source: @shanghaidaily – x.com

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov wore a sweatshirt to the recent Alaska summit that vividly displayed his nostalgic imagination. Written in large Cyrillic letters was “CCCP” or USSR. Like Donald Trump’s red cap featuring the slogan “Make America Great Again,” Lavrov indicated that he, like Vladimir Putin, imagined the Russian Federation returning to its past glory as the Soviet Union. The 70-year-old leaders of the United States and Russia are in time warps. Geopolitics exists in linear time. Countries, like individuals, cannot return to their past glories in circular time.

Nostalgia for the past can be an obsession. I’m no exception. Each season I closely follow the results of the New York Yankees and the New York Knicks to see if they can repeat their past glories. (They have not won major championships since 2009 and 1973, respectively.) Mine is not a simple optimism about the Yankees and Knicks winning games; it is an optimism about the teams returning to their former championship status.

Now it is one thing to imagine a sports team returning to a past dominant position, it’s quite another to imagine a country returning to its past hegemonic role. Can countries or empires which were once dominant return to those previous situations? While sports seasons repeat the same number of games and similar formats to win the ultimate title, geopolitics........

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