History Is Screaming

Nobody opines sagely anymore that the races will never get along, calmly ladling conventional certainties over the earnest idealism of civil-rights activists. But we live in a world so permeated with militarized fear of demagogic leaders and rogue states that nuclear deterrence retains enough of the default credibility it had during the Cold War, as the opposite of utopian naïveté, that common sense is still on the defensive.