Pre-war historical landscape
Applied to the approach of the Second World War in 1936, the alliance model predicts the impending coalitions of Axis and Allied powers in Europe with only a couple of minor errors (a). There is a second, metastable energy minimum, however, that paints a very different historical picture in which most of Europe unites against the former Soviet Union. As the interactions between nations shift in the few years after 1936, this metastable configuration (b) disappears at a point analogous to the spinodal point of a first-order phase transition, as shown in (c).