Politics & Power Quote by Neil Sheehan

The sentence lands like a pin to a balloon: “The unthinkable occurred” isn’t just scene-setting, it’s a diagnosis of a whole era’s intellectual laziness. Sheehan, a journalist forged in the Vietnam years, is puncturing the Cold War habit of treating “communism” as a monolith with a single brainstem. In the Western imagination, communist states were supposed to move as a bloc, their conflicts explainable only as Soviet chess moves. Two of them going to war doesn’t merely surprise; it exposes the ideology-first map as useless for navigating actual power.

The line’s craft is in its deadpan compression. “Two communist countries” is deliberately generic, as if labels should have been sufficient to predict behavior. Then the punch: “went to war with each other.” Not argued, not qualified, just stated. The subtext is that the “unthinkable” wasn’t the war itself; it was the failure of the categories that elites, analysts, and headline writers relied on. Sheehan is writing against a kind of political branding: the assumption that shared doctrine cancels geography, history, nationalism, and rivalry.

Contextually, it gestures toward the late-20th-century fractures inside the communist world (Sino-Soviet hostility, Vietnam-China conflict, border clashes) that made clear what realism always insisted: states don’t bleed for abstractions; they fight for security, prestige, territory. Sheehan’s intent is corrective, even chastening: stop mistaking ideological packaging for the engine underneath.