On his Hilarious Pessimist blog at the Salisbury Review, Dalrymple finds the Cold War doctrine of mutually assured destruction to be a useful analogy for a more modern threat:

I think the concept of MAD can usefully be adapted to the financial sphere. I have often wondered why anybody places any faith in any of the world’s currencies, when all of them are based upon precisely nothing and the supply of them can be increased at the stroke of a pen. They are all rotten to the core, and we know it…For the moment, all currencies are saved from utter worthlessness by the fact that they are all, at base, almost equally worthless.