Austin Bay opens his new book on the world's flashpoints with a scene from the end of the Cold War. Or, at least, a scene from an American high-school during those strange days, as the Soviet bloc crumbled in the early 1990s. A retired Army colonel turned military historian and novelist, Bay was invited to join a panel of successful people who could tell an auditorium of high-school students and their parents about career development.
As he was leaving, however, a peacenik parent—Bay describes her as an aging hippie, flash-forwarded from 1968—planted herself in front of him. Mocking his military background, she gleefully announced that "with so many people waging peace," Bay would "have to find another subject" to write about. Unwilling to argue the point, Bay slipped out the school door, mumbling that if not war, still what we faced was "a hazardous form of peace."
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