“Whenever something like this happens, as it has from time to time in the annals of geopolitics, any competent historian can, after the fact, show how the subsequent events that proved so momentous, and which crept up on everybody from behind, and which virtually no one predicted, were in actual fact some kind of inevitable. The whole thing was going to happen, somehow, someway. This kind of inevitability is a strange creature of time, being only visible from the rear and never from the front. Historians can see it clearly, but prognosticators, for some reason, cannot.”
Ride, Sally, Ride, pp. 1-2