I deliberately injected my story, “Challenge Coin,” with some ‘hopium,’ since I think we could all use a little optimism these days. And if certain things break the right way, some of my forecasts might be less pie-in-the-sky and turn out to be pretty reasonable. 3/

I will say, to their credit, no one at the NATO Defence College flinched or asked me to change anything when I hinted in my story that Donald Trump wins the 2024 election and promptly withdraws the United States from NATO for four years. 4/