In the wake of World War I, Milo Hastings imagined a future in which the then newly established League of Nations and Weimar Republic had both collapsed. He described a theoretical scenario in which Germany would be ruled by a single man who had leveraged the forces of ethnonationalism, socialism, and religion to declare himself a god. Hastings mused that Germany would instigate a second world war in 1983 and that a radical breakthrough in weapons...