Could Trump tensions lead to WWIII?

South Korean destroyers accompany US warships in patrolling

the western Pacific.

Picture: Getty Images

 

It’s an unremittingly grim prospect. It portends, potentially, Armageddon. And former defence force chief Chris Barrie, speaking at the Australian Leadership Retreat on the Gold Coast, is not alone in sounding the alarm.

 

But is the world really “sleepwalking” into another war? And will a “complacent” Australia not be ready when it comes?

The signs “look bad”, says Barrie, highlighting destabilising factors in our region and beyond including tensions between China and nations in the South China Sea, North Korea’s nuclear weapons, US isolationism under Don­ald Trump, the volatility in The Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte, and the risk that Turkey could become “another Syria”.

Few would argue with his assessment. As the US President rounds off his visit to Israel on his first overseas trip, Barrie’s apprehensions seem well founded.

The world is undergoing radical change.

Critically, the post-World War II certainties of Pax Americana are being challenged in a way they have not been for 40 years.

And there can be no assurance about where this will lead in a world in which vast nuclear arsenals are held not just by leading powers but also by countries such as Pakistan, India and, it appears increasingly likely, North Korea — with Iran, too, retaining ambitions that Saudi Arabia is determined to match.

In Riyadh on the weekend, Trump, in his excoriation of Islamist terrorism and demand that Muslim leaders join the “battle against good and evil”, left no doubt about where his administration stands. After eight years of Barack Obama feebly cosying up to Iran, Trump repositioned the US at the side of its traditional Sunni Arab allies, in so doing fiercely attacking the regional aggression of Shia Iran, which is closely allied to Russia.

He prepared the groundwork for a new contest with Moscow for influence in the turmoil of the Middle East cauldron that recalls the days of the Cold War.

This is but one aspect of the change that is under way in a world that is seeing longstanding US influence in the Asia-Pacific and elsewhere challenged by China’s economic and military power.

In Europe, too, the US and other NATO members, still smarting from Trump’s categorisation of their organisation as “obsolete”, have hurriedly deployed troops in Poland and the Baltic states to counter the perceived revanchist ambitions of Vladimir Putin following his annexation of Crimea and aggression against Ukraine.

As The Australian’s contributing national security editor Alan Dupont points out, it is a long way between this and anything suggesting that World War III is imminent. But in his widely acclaimed book The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, published to coincide with the centenary of World War I, Christopher Clark narrates how quickly and unexpectedly Europe descended into war — and, as Barrie points out, there are signs of similar “sleepwalking” now.

“What I see are a number of larger-scale movements that remind me a lot of the lead-up to war in 1914, and I agree with Professor Clark when he writes about the leaders just falling into the Great War scenario,” Barrie says.

“I do look back to 1914 and say: ‘Who would have thought it?’ Who would have thought that the archduke (Franz Ferdinand of Austria) being shot in Sarajevo would have led to the outbreak of war? Emperors, prime ministers and presidents of the US had been shot by assassins, but suddenly it was the one small event that made the big difference.

“Why? Because the world was antsy, arms races were on, people were highly nationalistic. All of these conditions exist now. But … we have forgotten what happens when nations go to war and lots of people lose their lives.

“We have lost a lot of that memory since 1945.”

It’s hard to argue with Barrie’s comparison between then and now: nationalism, indeed, is rife globally. Trump’s election victory against all odds on an isolationist “America first” ticket that included the specific threat to launch trade wars against China, epitomises that.

So does China’s nationalistic drive to assert itself over the South China Sea in defiance of smaller nation-states and traditional US power and influence in the region.

So does Putin’s aggressive annexation of Crimea and the belligerence he shows towards the Baltic states as part of his determination to return Russia to what he believes, as a former KGB colonel, were its Soviet-era glory days.

Nowhere have the effects of this new nationalism been manifested more remarkably than in the Brexit vote in Britain, and the like-minded antagonism towards outside interference and migrants seen widely across Europe, including in France, despite the election victory of the moderate Emman­uel Macron.

Islamist terrorism and the civil war in Syria are serving to stoke this nationalism in Europe, with each new jihadist attack and each new wave of migrants propelling fresh demands for inward-looking isolationism and a determination to draw down the shutters.

With Trump’s election and Brexit, the appetite for globalisation is collapsing, says Harold James, a professor at New Jersey’s Princeton University, adding that it is something that “often prefigures more conflict”.

“I think (a world war) is absolutely a serious threat,” he has told Sky News.

“We’re swinging back again from an era when everyone thought globalisation was inevitable to a period when people think there’s really a big problem with globalisation.

“More and more governments, but also political movements, commentators, people on the street are thinking that globalisation just isn’t working.”

That plays into the apprehensions expressed by Barrie and it is clear that much in the evolving scenario depends on Trump and whether he persists with the aggressive form of “America first” isolationism that won him the White House, and that has encouraged much of the nationalism being seen across the world.

The jury’s out, however.

Trump turning longstanding presidential precedent on its head by making the first stop of his first overseas trip Riyadh rather than Ottawa or London hardly reflects isolationism or withdrawal from the world.

Rather, it shows a welcome determination to reassert US influence and leadership into the maelstrom of the Middle East, which has so much to answer for in respect of the growth of Islamist terrorism and the enormous impact it is having on the mood of isolationism and drawing inward sweeping the world.

Trump, because he leads the most powerful nation on earth, is pivotal to whether Barrie’s fears are realised. And while his early foray into reasserting US leadership in the Middle East may be a promising sign, at the same time it must not be forgotten that his chief strategist and ideological consort Steve Bannon has warned: “We’re going to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years, there’s no doubt about that.”

In Bannon’s view, the Judeo-Christian West is “at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism” and “we’re clearly going into, I think, a major shooting war in the Middle East again”.

Like Samuel Huntington in his acclaimed work in the 1990s, Bannon seems to believe that a “clash of civilisations” is inevitable. Given an assessment by a group known as Physicians for Social Responsibility that at least 1.3 million people have died in the 16 years of the war against Islamist terrorism, many will agree.

Not for 40 years, in Dupont’s view, has the world seen such turbulence or uncertainty, with the stability of Pax Americana being challenged by a new world order — or disorder — that owes much to the drastic change of mood in the US, as well as to challenges thrown up by China, Russia, North Korea and Iran.

The actions of non-state groups such as Islamic State also are creating turmoil, while the rise of transnational cyber intrusions such as those at the heart of the dispute over Russian meddling in the US election, and even the existential threat posed by climate change, are creating challenges that have the potential to create new triggers for territorial and other disputes that could lead to conflict.

Overshadowing all this, meanwhile, is what eminent Australian National University professor Ramesh Thakur, in a paper titled Three Minutes to Midnight: Is the World Walking into a Nuclear Disaster?, refers to as a potential “nuclear Armageddon” ushered in by a “bomb (that) can kill us all a lot sooner and faster”.

On its own, the reality that the madcap regime in North Korea appears poised to get nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver them as warheads on missiles capable of reaching the US mainland and Australia could hardly be more alarming in the context of the “nuclear Armageddon” apprehended by Thakur.

But it is more than just North Korea: Trump has good reason to be sceptical of Obama’s optimism that Iran’s ayatollahs, still among the most notorious sponsors of state terrorism across the Middle East and elsewhere, will keep their word and not build a bomb.

If they do move in that direction, nothing is more certain than that Saudi Arabia will do so as well, using the technical expertise of fellow Sunni nation Pakistan, which through the years has built up a vast nuclear arsenal of more than 100 warheads, long viewed covetously by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qa’ida and other ­terrorist groups in the country and in neighbouring Afghanistan.

Barrie contends that amid this spectre of global turbulence and uncertainty, Australia is being absurdly complacent. War, the retired admiral warns, could be “reasonably close … I don’t think we take seriously enough the challenges that we are now confronting. It’s very easy just to motor along thinking not much has changed.”

Certainly, there is no doubt that the advent of the Trump presidency has introduced extensive uncertainty into the global picture, of which our policymakers are all too well aware. But the signs aren’t all bad; Trump has moderated much of the fierce rhetoric he used during the campaign, especially — and most significantly — in relation to launching a trade war with China that could have had unintended consequences. Such a trade war would have enormous global consequences and introduce serious new tensions in our region, especially in the South China Sea.

As well, for the time being at least, Trump appears to be trying to reassert strong US leadership across the world after the abysmal failures of the Obama years. Depending on how that evolves, it must be a reason for optimism.

But, as Barrie argues, we should be under no illusions. It is imperative that we prepare for the conflict he apprehends.

When we think back to Europe’s swift and unexpected descent into World War I and the way, in the 1930s, the great powers strove for “peace in our time” only to be plunged into World War II, we would be wrong to ignore his siren call.

Australia must heed his warning. The geopolitical changes now being seen may be a long way from World War III, but the precedent of the previous two global conflicts shows how quickly things can change in a volatile situation characterised by uncertainty and growing challenges to the longstanding, pivotal role played by the Pax Americana doctrine and the reassurance this gave allies such as Australia.

Trump, in his earlier meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping and now in the cauldron of the Middle East, is showing himself to be a fast learner, at least when it comes to the need to reassert the American leadership role in the world. He also appears to have abandoned much of his more incendiary campaign rhetoric, which is important.

Amid the vast uncertainties and change at the heart of Barrie’s warning, it is at least one hopeful sign that “sleepwalking” once more into another global conflict can be avoided.