Is the ongoing, brutal fighting in eastern Ukraine our Cuban Missile Crisis? On Tuesday, February 5, Nation contributing editor Stephen Cohen delivered a keynote speech at Fairfield University expressing just how high he thinks the geopolitical stakes have been raised in this conflict.

“The Europeans are in full panic and want this ended,” Cohen explained. “But they think the train may have left the station…. I look at the audience and I see people who not only were not born at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, but who weren’t alive when the Soviet Union ended. But believe me when I tell you, in the Cuban missile crisis, the discussion was, ‘Are we all gonna die in nuclear war?’”

—Hilary Weaver