OK, the referendum is over, Crimea is part of Russia, the NATO countries aren't going to invade, or bomb, or much else over this. The two sides are taking turns prohibiting big shots from either side from travelling across.
100 years ago, arch-conservative and poet T.S. Eliot, who moved to the UK in search of Empire to save "Western Civilization", wrote about recent events in those days.
The Russian Revolution has made men conscious of the position of Western Europe as ... a small and isolated cape on the western side of the Asiatic continent.
Is this another turning point in world affairs? With the Russian role in preventing the bombing of Syria (after NATO bombing campaigns in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, not to mention the endless, and continuing drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, ...), their role in stopping the Saakashvili atrocities in South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008, and now their role in putting the brakes on any ethnic cleansing in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, has the period of an unchallenged unipolar US world come to an end?
Secondarily, does this provide an opening for the left, in Canada and elsewhere, to more successfully outline alternatives to the US neo-liberal juggernaut that has wreaked such havoc since the early 1970's?