The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses

by Dan Carlin

The military historian Gwynne Dyer doesn’t find the fact that the two superpowers soured toward each other surprising at all. He likens it to earlier geopolitical rivalries and argues that the democracy-versus-communism Cold War dynamic was a lot like the role religion played in the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “Each side has an ideologically watertight explanation for why the adversary behaves with such persistent wickedness and aggression,” Dyer writes. “None of the post-1945 developments would seem surprising to a 17th century Spanish or Ottoman diplomat. Neither communism nor liberal democracy would mean anything to him, other than as a useful label for the players, but he would have no trouble understanding why the victorious alliance so quickly fell apart. They almost always do after victory, because the winners are the biggest players left on the board, hence they automatically become the greatest threats to each other’s power.”