Nigeria, March 7 -- The live drama staged in the Oval Office on 28 February between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was such that Zelenskyy might never have rehearsed in all his former life as a comedian.

Except that it wasn't funny. It was unprecedented. You would need to go back 64 years to find anything nearly as nasty as the Trump-Zelenskyy shouting match, with Trump's deputy, JD Vance, enthusiastically fanning the flames.

The showdown between John F Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev before the Cuban Missile Crisis was hair-raising, but it wasn't before a global audience or live TV. Everything else in between, from Richard Nixon's spats during Watergate to Robert Mugabe's faceoff with...