Is World War III in the Offing?
If the war comes, are we going to be written into history books as an allied power or an axis one?
No, Amazon Alexa did not claim world war three will start next month, despite a viral social media post.
But it sure looks as though a lot of some of the world’s most powerful nations are gearing up for something consequential.
Maybe not next month. Hopefully not ever. But could world war three be in the offing?
Let’s start with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine almost two years ago.
While there are progressive voices calling for “a negotiated peace,” other nations’ autocrats are watching how the United States reacts to Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Chinese president Xi Jinping just met with Putin two weeks ago to ostensibly discuss trade at a time when there is growing concern China may invade Taiwan. Like Putin’s claim Ukraine is really historically part of Russia and not a separate country — and the largest democracy in Europe, not coincidentally — Xi claims the island democracy of Taiwan is really part of mainland China and should be “united by force,” if necessary. He’s already asserted he is prepared to go to war with western powers over it.
We’ve seen this before. It’s old trope tin-pot despots trot out to try to gin up nationalism and justification for aggression against a politically fragile and less militarily advanced target, like Adolf Hitler claiming Austria and Czechoslovakia were historically part of “greater Germany.”
The main thing preventing Xi from from going ahead with it is international condemnation of Russia. If Ukraine’s western allies take their eyes off Ukraine’s fight for survival, it will provide Xi and other dictators permission to follow suit with their own invasions. If we just stay out of it, as many insist we ought to do, it will be emboldening autocrats all over the world at a time when more democracies are backsliding toward authoritarian regimes.
Last week, Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to express North Korea’s “steadfast will” to expand Russian ties. Those ties consist of Un’s support of Russia’s Ukraine invasion, for which US officials assert North Korean weapons are being shipped to Russia.
Russia, China, and North Korea.
All strong-man autocracies.
All united against democracy.
Are these the new axis powers?
What should concern us here at home is the fact that our very own
republican party is equally united against democracy.
Last week, eleven Democrats on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party sent letters to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Avril Haines, and CIA Director, William J. Burns, requesting a briefing on the Chinese government’s exploitation of our embarrassing House Speaker selection to distract and politically enervate America.
In the letter, they state:
[O]ur foreign adversaries are leveraging current political dysfunction in the U.S. House of Representatives to discredit democracy globally in their efforts to promote an alternative authoritarian model of governance internationally, enhance their ability to form economic and national security alliances, and harm our standing with strategic partners.
Peter Beinart wrote last month for The New York Times:
In March, a Gallup poll found that while Democrats were 23 points more likely to consider Russia a greater enemy than China, Republicans were a whopping 64 points more likely to say the reverse. There is evidence that this discrepancy stems in part from the fact that while President Vladimir Putin of Russia casts himself as a defender of conservative Christian values, President Xi Jinping leads a nonwhite superpower whose regime has spurned the Christian destiny many Americans once envisioned for it.
And it looks as though the autocrats got their man in our House with the elevation of ultra-MAGA, hard-right, pseudo Christian Rep. Mike Johnson, who recently echoed the GOP wish of cutting off aid to Ukraine in favor of giving it all to Israel.
As progressive talk show host and author Thom Hartmann recently wrote in his piece “How Trump’s MAGA GOP Increases the Risk of WWIII”:
Until the war [WWI] was well underway, nobody believed it would be anything other than a limited, regional conflict. And then it wasn’t — and all hell broke loose, killing 17 million human beings and wounding, displacing, or disappearing another 28 million.
World War II, on the other hand, came about because an anti-democratic bully axis of fascist strongman states (Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan) decided the world’s honeymoon with democracies was long over and, being “weaker” than tough-guy autocracies, we wouldn’t have the stomach to take on the bullies.
Sound eerily familiar?
We had Hitler apologists in American government during WWII just as we have fascist apologists in government now.
Aiding Ukraine is preventing world war.
But then there’s the Middle East, where conflicts have been raging so long, we’ve just become numb to them.
When in recent memory have we not been involved in some sort of conflict in the Middle East? As George Orwell wrote in his novel 1984, “The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
The recent outbreak between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas, though, is different, because it is threatening to draw in more regional powers than we’ve seen in decades.
Hamas gets much of its funding from Iran, a country explicitly interested in eliminating Israel.
The United States is allied with Israel.
Inveigle one, draw in the other.
Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on the other hand, wants nothing more than to eliminate the Palestinian state, or at least render it incapable of realizing its own sovereignty.
Yesterday Netanyahu explained in a news conference that “the war in the (Gaza) Strip will be long and difficult and we are prepared for it.”
He also announced “the second war of independence” in the news conference, in which he said:
We have unanimously approved the widening of the ground invasion. Our objective is singular: to defeat the murderous enemy. We declared “never again”, and we reiterate: “never again, now”.
Miri Eisin, who runs a counter-terrorism institute at Reichman University in Israel, explained:
Whether this will lead to a bigger war is the $64,000 question. If Iran has a finger in this, do we now preempt against the next stage?
Mark Stone, reporting for Sky News, added:
Iran is how the conflict spirals. And if Israel finds a smoking gun, global anxiety increases.
Nothing would please Hamas leaders more than drawing Iran and their Lebanon-based Shiite extension Hezbollah into the fray.
In fact, the United States has already started striking an Iran-linked storage facility and an ammunition storage facility in Syria where Russia has been entrenched for 12 years assisting Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in a brutal civil war.
The cause of these airstrikes is attacks on US airbases in Syria and Iraq from two jihadist groups, one linked to Iraq, another believed to be a front group for Hezbollah.
Last week a US warship in the Red Sea intercepted missiles fired by Iran-backed Houthi rebels from Yemen, possibly aimed at Israel.
This is the most precarious time in geopolitical history in recent memory. Thankfully we have a president in Joe Biden who is measured, thoughtful, and diplomatic.
Those are precisely the qualities the modern-day republican party despises. With a blatant bias toward right-wing autocrats and an antipathy toward democracy, the republican party would love nothing better than to see us aligning with Putin, Xi, and Kim Jong Un and eschew the constitutionally limited democratic republic that has served as a global exemplar for over 200 years.
It’s not hyperbole.
Consider the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” that, according to its website, proposes a goal to “rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left” by “build[ing] on four pillars that will, collectively, pave the way for an effective conservative Administration” by handing total power over quasi-independent government agencies to a future president.
So, if the war comes, are we going to be written into history books as an allied power or an axis one?
There is a saying attributed to Albert Einstein that says, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”