The Precipice

Analysis: Vladimir Putin is using North Korea as a pawn in a real-life global chess game to rebuild the Russian empire. Here’s what you need to know.

The Twilight War.  That was what Winston Churchill called the first few months of World War Two.

Adolf Hitler’s Nazi army attacked Poland in a pre-dawn blitzkrieg on September 1, 1939. Two days later, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared war but British troops didn’t step onto the battleground for several months.

Hitler and Josef Stalin had agreed to carve up Poland in a non-aggression pact and the two despots did just that. A month after Germany invaded Poland from the West, Russia attacked her from the East.

The Twilight War — or the Phony War as it became known – served as a prelude to actual conflict. The allies dropped propaganda leaflets over Germany to expose Hitler’s true intentions. The NAZI’s also sank the SS Athenia, a passenger ship bound from Glasgow to Montreal which they claimed was an error.

For seven months, the German…