The minister of protocol also owned a Hickory Farms franchise in a North Carolina shopping mall. Our conversation, after all, took place in Beirut, a city where until recently people fished with hand grenades and raised their kids in buildings surmounted by machine-gun nests, where a pleasant evening at a French restaurant could be interrupted by a car bomb. Happily, there are no new Hiroshimas and very few Beiruts today. Sarajevo and Belfast are recovering as well. Saigon is peaceful.
Berlin is united and tame.
Even Russia, with its mafioso and hookers and general malaise, isn't terribly scary. But even in the comparatively mild global environment we now enjoy, it is not advisable for a westerner to wander too far off the well-guarded path. Tourists at the pharonic monuments in Egypt know that. So do visitors to the Mayan tombs in Guatemala and the game reserves in Uganda. We are ending a century of horrific conflict, including two world wars and a nuclear standoff so dangerous that a false move in Washington or Moscow could have extinguished the human race several times over.