Wartime President

On 5 November, American voters will likely go for a leader who would carry the superpower through what is considered the most dangerous time for humanity since World War 2. Political pundits are betting on voters to consider the probability of a looming global conflict that would involve the United States when they cast their ballots.

Neither candidate — Republican former President Donald Trump nor Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris — has stated a definite position on the perils represented by the growing geopolitical and defense industrial collaboration among China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.

Geopolitical experts said this axis of aggressors may be unprecedented in its potential peril.

Frederick Kempe, president and chief executive officer of Washington-based think tank Atlantic Council, said neither candidate has outlined the “sort of generational strategy that will be required by the United States to address the challenge (of an emerging alliance of the four nations).”

The next US president will become commander-in-chief at the most perilous geopolitical moment since the Cold War — and perhaps since World War 2.

Washington Post columnist George Will compared the 2024 US elections to the 1940 polls when the United States hadn’t yet formally declared war on Imperial Japan, Hitler’s Germany, or Mussolini’s Italy.

The candidates then were the incumbent President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Republican businessman Wendell Willkie. Roosevelt, according to Will, sensed he was about to become a wartime president and was acting like it.

FDR, Will stated, “was nudging a mostly isolationist nation toward involvement in a global conflict” with his 1937 “quarantine speech” on aggressor nations and through his subsequent military buildup.

“Americans will not have a comparably reassuring choice when they select the president who will determine the nation’s conduct during World War 3, which has begun,” the columnist wrote.

He compared Russia’s recent moves to that of Nazi Germany’s prior to the eruption of World War 2.

“Just as World War 2 began with a cascade of crises initiated by the coalescing axis of Japan, Germany and Italy, so today there is a similar axis — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.”

The current global crisis began not later than Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea, Will reckoned. A growing consensus is a 20-percent to 30-percent chance of worldwide warfare and that the next three years mark a moment of maximum danger.

In the short term, however, the US will face challengers in Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who may see a window of opportunity in the domestic distractions, a defense sector not yet adequate for emerging challenges, and an electorate that questions the value and necessity of US international engagement.

The worry among American geopolitical experts is that both leaders might calculate that acting more forcefully against Ukraine and Taiwan now could produce a greater chance of success than in the future.

“From Russia’s western border to the waters where China is aggressively encroaching on Philippine sovereignty, the theater of today’s wars and almost-war episodes spans six of the globe’s 24 time zones,” WaPo’s Will indicated.

Winston Churchill’s World War 2 memoirs mentioned a “gathering storm” of a world war similar to the conflicts now playing out.

The analysts failed to mention either of the two rivals for the presidency as having an edge over the other, with one opinion writer even saying that both have a “reckless disregard” for failing to provide voters “any evidence of awareness, let alone serious thinking about, the growing global conflagration.”

Kempe quoted from Roosevelt’s third inaugural address in January 1941, almost a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which prompted Congress to declare war on Japan the following day.

“In the face of great perils never before encountered, our strong purpose is to protect and to perpetuate the integrity of democracy.”

American voters will have to choose who between Trump and Harris will have the balls to confront the challenge of looming global strife in which a mistake may lead the world to perdition.