Will Neville Trump Bring On World War III?

Every male who’s ever encountered a grammar-school bully knows the best way to make sure the bullying never stops: don’t fight back. It doesn’t matter whether you get a bloody nose, get knocked down, or even “lose.” All you have to do is fight back. The bully will then back off, if only to find an easier target.

It’s tragic that lessons most of us learn in grammar school are lost in geopolitics, even though history reinforces them. The parallels between pre-war Europe and our global dilemma today are so close that family, if not personal, memory can inform us.

Before World War II, Britain was the democratic global superpower, just as the US is today. It had an empire on which the Sun never set. It had been among the chief victors in World War I and had helped impose harsh terms on the loser, the Kaiser’s imperial Germany.

Yet when Nazi Germany reached to grab the Sudetenland from hapless Czechoslovakia, Neville Chamberlain apparently hadn’t learned the grammar-school lesson. The result was a year of false peace and the most brutal, catastrophic war in human history, in which an estimated 50-80 million people died prematurely. (And that “peace” was all the more deceptive for giving Hitler yet another year to build weapons and organize his Panzers.)

Now comes Neville Trump. Personal parallels fail. Chamberlain was a well-educated Conservative British pol, with decades of service in high offices. Trump is a poorly educated, multiply failed businessman and compulsive liar whose accidental first presidency was his only prior public office. And not only is Trump a bully himself. He apparently suffers from senile dementia.

Like Neville Chamberlain, Trump is promising “Peace in our time.” Yet in coveting Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal, he sometimes seems eager to emulate Putin, on a much smaller scale, rather than stop him. Nevertheless, the grammar-school lesson still applies to Putin, who may have eyes on Greenland, too.

Members of Congress, including Republican Senators, know well the lesson of Chamberlain. Some recited it before Trump’s recent win. And though Congress has largely abdicated its power to declare war since our disgrace in Vietnam, our Constitution still gives that power to Congress alone.

If Congress has the power to declare war, surely it has the duty to avoid another global one by facing down a global aggressor without involving our own troops. It seems that a host of Republican Senators, nearly all of them males, have cravenly forgotten the grammar-school lesson.

No doubt the interwar British felt themselves partly immune, protected by the English Channel that later saved their defeated army at Dunkirk. No doubt Neville Trump considers us immune, protected by our nuclear umbrella (which he appears intent on denying Europe) and by the vast oceans that separate us from Russia. No doubt he is too dull to foresee the catastrophic global economic, social and environmental consequences of even a “minor” World War III in Europe, say, over Poland, Romania, the Baltics and Finland. He can’t seem to fathom the vastly increased risk of such a widened war going nuclear.

Britain learned the fragility of distance in the Blitz. In our age of hypersonic intercontinental ballistic missiles and artificial satellites, its protection is even more an illusion.

The fate of our cultural and intellectual mothers and fathers, who are now our NATO allies, is our fate, too. An imperialist dictator’s war that touches them will be ours, too. There is no way we can avoid it, if only to supply the much greater quantities of arms and ammo they will need to fight when Putin’s insatiable imperial ambition turns to them, and when time has made his war machine far more formidable.

The best time to fight back and stop the bully is now, when his forces are stalled in Ukraine, and when we can do so at no cost in blood to us or to the rest of Europe.

Ukraine shares our thirst for democracy and openness. Its leader Zelenskyy does, too. He’s one of the most heroic and sympathetic leaders of our new century. If we cannot find it in our hearts to spend a few bucks to continue supporting him and his brave people—and in the process to modernize our own drones and other non-nuclear weapons—we can be certain that immense suffering will follow. And that suffering will not be confined to Europe, let alone Ukraine.

As for nuclear weapons, the very same lesson applies. The time to stop the bully is now, not when the fighting is on multiple fronts, perhaps closer to Moscow.

Now Putin knows that international norms and agreements—not to mention non-medieval morality—forbid bald, unprovoked aggression for territorial conquest. Yet when/if the war expands to Poland, Romania, the Baltics and Finland, the temptation for our allies to march on Moscow, or to bomb it or the Kremlin using stealth aircraft, missiles or drones, will become irresistible.

It is only then that Putin will feel backed into a corner, like the cornered rat in the St. Petersburg staircase that formed his worldview. That would be almost certain to provoke a nuclear response, and perhaps a nuclear war that would extinguish our species.

Endnote on “Freeloading” by our NATO Allies. Of course it would be helpful, right and effective for the Baltics, Europe and Scandinavia to do more in their own defense. (Ukraine is doing all of which it is conceivably capable, including maintaining a home-made drone industry.) Nevertheless, there’s a huge problem in timing.

It took us all of the eighty years since WWII to reach the pinnacle of advanced armament, global reach, and instantaneous electronic coordination that the US inhabits as the preeminent superpower today. It would take at least a decade for the Baltics, Europe and/or Scandinavia to reach similar heights. It might take longer, simply because those powers, unlike the US, enjoy no common, universal language and have diverse military supply chains, customs and commands.

Without American help now, some—perhaps even most—of them would become involuntary parts of a New Russian Empire. Not only would that be a gigantic human tragedy: Gulags across Europe. It would mark a catastrophic shift in the global balance of power.

With power comes responsibility. If the US shirks its responsibility now, just to punish what Trump sees as “freeloaders,” the world now and our progeny later will be terribly sorry. And our green Earth will be a far darker and more dangerous place.

And don’t forget where the money we spend on helping Ukraine and our NATO Allies goes. The vast majority of it goes into our own defense industries, to buy the arms and equipment we supply others.

Not only does that expense help keep us safe for an uncertain and dangerous future. It also keeps alive our dying manufacturing sector. It thus supports good jobs for workers without a college education.

Finally, that money supports an infrastructure of “hard” technology and science underlying hard goods and global coordination, far beyond the “Big Tech” of software implementing mere business and logistic ideas. Like it or not, some of the greatest advances in human knowledge have come from the quest for better weapons, including nuclear ones. That was the origin of our nuclear power industries, which even now are helping us hold back climate change.

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