| Summary/Abstract |
Until recently, when teaching international history, I used to debate my students whether things really are worse than they had ever been. It’s been a common refrain for at least a decade, and not just among undergraduates. War, terrorism, sectarian violence, economic volatility—all have been portrayed as either the worst crisis we’ve seen, or that the collective impact of these crises has put the world in an unprecedented and ever-deteriorating emergency; I’ve been skeptical. When my students would bring up the war in Syria, for example, I’d point out that the wars in Korea in the 1950s and Indochina in the 1960s and 70s were much worse: more dead, more wounded, more environmental damage, and so on. When they would point to U.S. tensions with China or Russia, I’d point out that Cold War tensions were worse, that they led to levels of violence we couldn’t fathom today, and that the truly existential risk from decades of nuclear deterrence and mutual assured destruction is not nearly as serious as it had been between the 1950s and early 1980s.
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