Trump is right about World War III, wrong about the analysis
Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it’s tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. And yet the former and perhaps future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon.
“We're a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you're going to end up in World War III, just to go into another subject.” He brought it up twice more. “We’re going to end up in a Third World War,” he closed. “And it will be a war like no other because of nuclear weapons.”
Oh dear. Could we please stick to speculating about feasting on felines as we contemplate the United States and the world for the next four years? We can’t, unfortunately, because even experts increasingly worry about a new specter of major and global war.
They do so for at least three reasons. One is the proliferation of hot regional wars, notably those in Ukraine and the Middle East, and the potential for more to break out, from the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea to the Korean peninsula. A second is that the direct or indirect aggressors in these conflicts — Russia, Iran, China and North Korea — increasingly behave like an “axis,” and could coordinate an attack against the US or its allies. The third is indeed nuclear: Russia has roughly as many warheads as the US; China
