The world sometimes falls asleep in August and when it wakes in September it sorely rues the nap. Some of the most consequential events in modern western history happened in August. Perhaps presidents and prime ministers should seriously consider taking their vacations in any month except August. As a reminder, the opening battles of World War I, the most disastrous conflict in history to that point, were fought in the eighth month of 1914. After the 1918 truce, lasting but 27 years, the world again fell asleep at the switch in August 1939 when Adolf Hitler was mobilizing his army to invade Poland, igniting World War II.

In August 1945 the United States threw two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, leading to the much broader Persian Gulf War. And it was on August 6, 2001 that then U.S. President George W. Bush was given a memo that Al Qaeda was determined to attack inside the United States. And of course, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev surely must wish he’d never taken his vacation in August 1991.