While not matching the intensity and devastation of World War I and World War II, the period following 1945 would seem to most casual observers of history as a generally violent one, consumed with deadly regional wars, revolutions, and the possibility of a nuclear exchange. Though acknowledging the rivalries, anxieties, and dangers of The Cold War, historian John Lewis Gaddis, in The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System, argues that it was the longest period of stability amongst the great powers during the 20th century (142). He even calls the period “peaceful”, however not within the context that most take the word, but in the sense that it was less chaotic, and more enduring, then past systems. Then, he analyzes
