Andreas Kluth: Trump is right about World War III, wrong about the analysis

Because much of what Donald 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 alarms 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 U.S. or its allies. The third is indeed nuclear: Russia has roughly as many warheads as the U.S.; China is racing for parity with both of them; North Korea is adding to its stash; and Iran is perilously close to building its own.

So the risks go beyond campaign hyperbole. What, though, should the U.S. do? Prepare for World War III? If it’s coming anyway, that would seem prudent. But doing so could turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. It would also be so ruinously expensive that the U.S. might have to sacrifice its prosperity in the process.

Official Washington — the Pentagon, Congress, the think tanks and so forth — tends to swaddle such existential debates into language that normal people don’t understand, lest we all freak out. That means you have to pay extra attention to dry terms such as “force construct,” which refers to the government’s definition of what the American military should be able to do, and specifically how many wars it should be able to fight and win at the same time.

The government first started formulating explicit answers to that question, usually buried deep in Pentagon documents, just after the Cold War. At that time, Russia seemed less menacing and China wasn’t a threat yet. The U.S. was in effect a hyperpower and explicitly adopted a force construct of being able to win two regional wars simultaneously — for example, one in the Middle East and one on the Korean peninsula — while putting out smaller “brush fires” elsewhere (in the Balkans, say).

This two-war strategy remained doctrine for two decades. By the administration of Barack Obama, though, the U.S. was exhausted by the twin fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan (where the opponents weren’t even “near-peers,” to use the lingo). So the force construct was rewritten as winning one major war while keeping other adversaries in check (without fighting them).

Wonks called the new construct one-war, 1+, 1.5 and other slyly ironic names (why not √3?). But the shift fits a new era of more modest ambition abroad. Both Trump and President Joe Biden kept the strategy, with policy documents speaking of “defeating” one major power and “deterring” others.

Now the wind has shifted again. Scholars are calling for a “three-theater” strategy to fight and win simultaneously in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The Commission on the National Defense Strategy, appointed by Congress to review the Pentagon’s construct, goes further, demanding a military that can simultaneously defeat China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, while still crushing terrorist groups on the side. By my count, that’s a 4.5-war strategy.

Our dilemma is that these options are all bad. The obvious shortcoming of the one-war construct is that the U.S., whether it wants to or not, might have to fight in more than one “theater,” as in World War II. And if it only prepares for one, it could lose in the others.

Worse, the one-war stance might actually dare enemies to become aggressive, if they think the U.S. is already preoccupied on another front. Say America is fighting China in the Taiwan Strait; North Korea might conclude that this is a good time to attack the South. In general terms, the U.S. can’t credibly claim to remain a global leader, with alliances and commitments in many places, if it’s ready to fight in only one place.

One downside of the three (or 4.5) war construct is that the U.S. can’t afford it. Washington reels from one budget crisis to another (October is nigh), and interest on the government debt already exceeds military spending. Are Americans ready to double or triple defense expenditures to their share of GDP during the Cold War? Even the Commission on the National Defense Strategy concedes that its construct would require much higher taxes and big cuts to Medicare and Social Security.

The even bigger drawback is that a three-war policy would set off a “spiral” known in international relations as a “security dilemma.” Coined in 1950, that term refers to any situation in which one state (the U.S., in this case) feels threatened and arms, thereby scaring its adversaries (China, say) into arming faster, which then frightens the U.S. even more, and so forth. That logic applies to conventional and to nuclear warfare. Not good.

The go-to escape hatch in these ever gloomier war games has become the word “allies.” Since the U.S. can’t deter or defeat all the world’s bad actors by itself, it needs help from its friends. So the European NATO partners must step up in defending against Russia; and Japan, Australia, and the other Asian allies need to get ready to fight China. All these armies, navies, air and space forces must work together, supplying one another with the interoperable weapons (so everybody can load and repair them), and fighting with one strategy.

This is not a modest proposal. It would require an entirely new worldview, over stiff domestic opposition, in capitals from Berlin to Canberra and Tokyo. The allies have long assumed that the Americans would come to their aid, not they to the Americans.’ The idea also assumes unprecedented upheaval in Washington’s Byzantine defense-procurement and planning bureaucracy, which gums up cooperation with foreign partners at every step.

Merely broaching the subject of upgrading America’s relationship with its allies should disqualify Trump from office, based on what we know about him. He doesn’t see foreign partners as brothers-in-arms with whom to keep the peace or win the war. With his petty transactional mind, he instead treats them as a used-car salesman greets walk-ins.

That said, if Trump doesn’t have answers, neither does Harris, at least so far. The scariest thing about this debate may be that in his febrile bouts of logorrhea, Trump inadvertently brought up a risk that all of us need to discuss, and not just in the United States.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.

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