John Nye: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why? Because I think we’ve lived through such a period of relative peace and order that we are taking for granted how unprecedented this is. Despite all the wars that erupted since World War II, there has not been a major global conflict at that level in many, many . . . in nearly, what, three-quarters of a century now? And that’s quite unusual. It’s also unusual that the number-one leading military power has done so little, contrary again to what a lot of people say about it, to expand its power militarily. And there are a lot of reasons for that, many of them very good, both moral as well as practical. Nonetheless, that’s an anomaly in world history, I think, in many ways. And I still think there’s a kind of second law of thermodynamics for political economy in which disorder has a pull. And I worry a lot about the stability of the liberal world order in the next century. How much of a pessimist was Hobbes?…

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