Oliver Stone is adding a chapter to his 2012 book The Untold History of the United States covering 2012-2019. He basically argues that in 2012 things were not great but getting better, while in 2019 “the unthinkable has become thinkable”. The litany includes continued threats of NATO expansion, wars in the greater Middle East, backing out of the Iran deal and historic Cold War-era nuclear weapons treaties, expanding the nuclear arsenal, threatening behavior against North Korea and China, and continuing to deny and ignore climate change.

In my view, while the U.S. adversaries are not blameless, we need to understand that their governments feel legitimately threatened by our government. The U.S. government has the world’s largest military, the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, and has used its military frequently and unilaterally against weaker countries. A path to real peace would have to include some credible means of convincing other countries that we will not attack except in self defense, and we don’t have the track record to convince anyone of this. And in a world where the food supply and coastal population centers are going to start coming under threat from nature, humanity needs to be unified and undistracted to have a chance to deal with other threats.