Dan Gardner: America’s Decade of Terrorism? Try the 1970s

Dan Gardner’s column appears Wednesday and Friday.

If you say something horrible will happen within the next five years, and it does, everyone will talk about the horrible thing and you will be hailed as a visionary. And if it doesn’t? Don’t worry about it. No one talks about horrible things that don’t happen and no one will remember what you said five years ago.

So it’s “heads, I win; tails, you forget we had a bet.” You can’t lose.

But what if you predict that something horrible will not happen? Then you can’t win. And your name is John Mueller.

Mueller is a political scientist at Ohio State University. He’s also a born contrarian who has been right about some of the biggest issues of the last several decades. The Soviet Union. Nuclear proliferation. War. Time and again, Mueller took a position at odds with the leading experts. And he was right.

But John Mueller has not been hailed as a visionary because, for the most part, he hasn’t been right about horrible things happening. He’s been right that horrible things wouldn’t happen...