The hope was that its dire threats would make it unthinkable for any country to breach 3%.
Those hearings infuriated the country, and made it unthinkable that banks would continue to be allowed to sell securities.
Clinton invoked executive action because the N.R.A. has made it unthinkable that a Republican-controlled Congress could pass meaningful gun-control legislation.
"We have to make it not only illegal, we have to make it unthinkable … I feel this is God's mission for me.
But he makes it plain, without wringing his hands or denigrating the locals, that the culture of violence along with tribal and religious intrigue make it unthinkable for Western democratic values to take root any time soon.
In the aftermath of the 2002 sectarian riots in Gujarat, fear would have made it unthinkable for a Muslim to run a nonvegetarian restaurant in a primarily Hindu part of Ahmedabad.
When Daneman met members of the Fontes clan in Brazil, she understood how Latin family pride had made it unthinkable that a young dancer, Peggy Hookham, a remote relative, should adopt their name as a stage pseudonym.
"Up until now, the lives of the Dreamers themselves, their courage, and their willingness to tell their own stories — that's what protected them, because that's what makes it so unthinkable for the government to remove them," Cecilia Muñoz, who, as the director of the Domestic Policy Council in the Obama White House, helped craft DACA, told me recently.
It may seem far-fetched to consider war when today's conflict is mostly bamboo sabre rattling, but the voracious appetite that the two nations exhibit for oil today makes it far from unthinkable.
The European Economic Community, as it then was, helped to keep the peace in Europe, by making it even more unthinkable that Germany and France, the adversaries of 1870, 1914 and 1939, would ever go to war again.
