There’s a difference between a historian, a popularizer of history, and a historical commentator for popular culture. Any supposedly serious historian who pronounces on events that are still ongoing is a fraud.
Historical PERSPECTIVE is always called for, but that certainly doesn't preclude any historian from drawing conclusions about how something in the present looks, or doesn't, look like something in the past.
FYI, I wrote the updated edition to "A Patriot's History of the United States" in late 2006, with events through early 2005, and so far haven't seen anything that would change my perspective on any of it. When I wrote "The Entrepreneurial Adventure" in 2000, commenting on the Japanese "miracle" of the late 1980s, the evidence I had then said Japan was already a non-factor. Seems I was right there, too.