What will happen to you?

"Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it"—This cliche, a favorite of history teachers, contains some truth. The book you are reading, for example, provides some solid guidance: Governments that ignore the wishes of the people probably won't long endure; wars are easier to start than to stop; and investments that seem to be "too good to be true" probably are. But apart from such common-sense observations, history provides few clues about the future.

The first decade of the twenty-first century proves this point emphatically. In 2000 Americans were mostly optimistic, and for good reason. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States had no significant enemies. A new era of peace was dawning. Successive presidents reduced the nation's armed forces by nearly a million men and women; defense spending (as a proportion of the GNP) was nearly cut in half. Three decades of deficits had come to an end: In 2000 the U. S. Treasury operated at a $250 billion surplus. The Congressional Budget Office projected a $4 trillion federal surplus for the coming decade.

¦ A U. S. military convoy travels from Kabul to southern Afghanistan; the photo was taken by Second Lieutenant Chris Vongsawat.

It didn't happen. The terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, which virtually no one predicted, shattered hopes for peace. Within two years, American soldiers were fighting fierce battles in Afghanistan and Iraq. By the end of the decade, over 5,000 U. S. servicemen and women would be dead and many thousands more wounded.

By then, too, an economic earthquake had nearly toppled the nation's major financial institutions. By late 2008 political and economic leaders were spending trillions to prop up banks, investment houses, and insurance firms that "were too big to fail." The federal deficit for the decade approached $4 trillion.

More bad news was to come. In early 2010 an oil rig owned by British Petroleum blew up, killing eleven men who had been working on the rig and releasing millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Thousands of miles of coastal wetlands and beaches and untold numbers of water birds, shrimp and fish were fouled with oil. President Obama called it the nation's worst environmental disaster ever.

By then, Time magazine had already pronounced these years "The Decade from Hell." But no one had any inkling of this in 1992. ¦