Maybe it was very stable, but underneath this veneer of high-level stability, namely mutually assured destruction, you had civil wars, you had proxy wars, you had genocides. The Cold War, I think it’s a misnomer to call it the half-century great peace or the Long Peace. Yes, we averted a nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union but there were all kinds of hotspots, tens of millions of people perished, and we came so close so many times.
