thomas hobbes

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/opinion/25friedman.html
"Paging Uncle Sam"
by Thomas Friedman
February 25, 2009
The New York Times

In a way, you can almost look at the history of the 20th century as an argument for Hobbes' views - when there were a lot of nations with power, we had great power politics, and that gave us two world wars. When you had two, we didn't have major wars, but that's mainly because of MAD, and we nearly all died. And since the fall of the USSR, we've had twenty years of peace and prosperity nearly the world over.