One of the enduring myths about Donald Trump is that he is an isolationist: a president bent on dismantling alliances and hauling up the drawbridge on America’s engagement with the world. The reality is more unsettling. Trump’s instincts may incline toward retrenchment, but they coexist with a pugnacious temperament and a visceral conception of American honor.
Given that volatile combination, it is easy to imagine an adversary taunting him out of restraint – or a well-meaning but insufficiently sensitive ally, or even an unprovoked emotional spasm, producing the same effect. After that, who knows where events might lead?
Over the past year of his second presidency, Trump has authorised the use of American force against the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Iran’s clerical regime, Islamic State remnants in Syria, and even intervened in Venezuela to dislodge Nicolás Maduro, while oscillating between threats and diplomatic overtures toward Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
The result is a foreign policy that remains unsettled and ad hoc, more reactive than strategic. In such conditions, it would be complacent to rule out the risk of a major war sparked not by design but by error – a miscalculation, an accident or a crisis that spirals because its central actor is as volatile as he is unpredictable. The danger, in other words, lies less in a deliberate march toward global conflict than in the unsettling ease with which a turbulent presidency could stumble into one.
At some point Trump may confront a foreign-policy shock – and it is perhaps surprising that one has not yet materialized. George W. Bush faced September 11 less than eight months into office. His father had to deal with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire during his first year. John F. Kennedy blundered into the Bay of Pigs within three months and confronted the Cuban missile crisis the following year. Trump has weathered a few storms since his second inauguration, but nothing that yet qualifies as a systemic emergency.
If a crisis comes, the trigger could be either unforeseen or long anticipated: China, rattled by military purges, a property bust and youth unemployment, deciding to invade Taiwan; Russia probing NATO’s Article 5 by testing Washington’s resolve against an ally; enhanced Sino-Russian cooperation to press into the Arctic; a coordinated cyber-attack plunging parts of the United States into darkness; Sunni jihadists attempting to seize Damascus. The spark may be calculated or reckless, the product of strategy or sheer accident. Either way, history suggests that crises rarely announce themselves politely in advance.
Then there is the perennial danger of unintended consequences. In 1914 Europe’s political leaders expected a short conflict on the model of the Franco-Prussian War, after which commerce and diplomacy would resume. Even though the conflict erupted where the interests of three vast empires collided, few grasped that they were stumbling into a catastrophe that would consume those empires rather than settle disputes.
Had the German Kaiser, the Russian Czar and the Austrian emperor known in August 1914 what they found out in 1918 – with their thrones vacant and empires disintegrating – they would have recoiled. History’s enduring lesson is that wars are often launched in confidence and concluded in ruin – a thought Trump might ponder as he contemplates another strike on Iran.
The sheer horror of nuclear weapons has endowed modern leaders with a sense of realism about the devastation that would follow any major conflict. This foreknowledge has almost certainly contributed to the caution shown by Washington and Moscow over the past eight decades, as they avoided a direct clash despite intense hostility and repeated moments of peril, especially during the Cold War. Nuclear weapons, in this sense, have functioned not merely as instruments of destruction but as instruments of restraint.
But what if there is an accident or miscalculation or even technological failure? In such circumstances, complacency could prove fatal. Deterrence has worked before – and many analysts argue that it would have continued to contain Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003 had Washington not opted for a preventive war whose consequences proved so destabilizing. But deterrence is not a law of nature. Nuclear war remains improbable, but it is not impossible.
How would this White House handle a grave crisis? It is a fair bet it would struggle. This president is famously impulsive and uninterested in sustained study, and he is surrounded by advisers and officials who, to borrow an old phrase, are not people one would wish to go tiger-shooting with. As David Brooks has remarked of defense secretary Pete Hegseth: “The world is on fire – and what’s his obsession? Wokeness in the military.”
In fairness to Trump, his unpredictability may itself exert a deterrent effect. During his first term, critics warned he might trigger a world war; those dire forecasts did not materialize, and global tensions in fact worsened under his successor.
My point, however, is narrower and more troubling: Trump’s thin grasp of world affairs and unsettled governing instincts have produced a foreign policy that is difficult to decipher and unsettling to allies in Asia and Europe at precisely the moment when disciplined alliance management is needed to deter a rising China. It is China – not Russia, Sunni jihadists or Iran’s Shia mullahs and militia – that represents the greatest threat to US strategic and economic primacy, especially in the world’s most important region.
Widely perceived abroad as an impulsive loose cannon, Trump has functioned less as a grand strategist than as an accelerant of uncertainty. He is prone to provocation and liable to swing abruptly from caution to confrontation.
What, then, are the odds of a world war? In his new book The Next World War, Reuters columnist Peter Apps estimates that “the risk stands at around 30 to 35 percent over the coming decade,” warning that the figure would rise if America’s allies fail to hold together.
Perhaps. But will US allies hold together? Australia – the only ally to have fought alongside the United States in every major conflict since 1914 – is also, like so many states in our region, deeply dependent on China for its trade and prosperity. Even in Canberra there is growing awareness of the hazards of too enthusiastic an embrace of American foreign policy in the Trump era.
And Australia is hardly alone. US allies across Europe and the Indo-Pacific face the same strategic bind: stay close to Washington, but resist automatic or unqualified endorsement; hedge against the possibility that volatile leadership in the Oval Office could drag them into confrontations not of their choosing. In these circumstances, prudence among allies may matter as much as loyalty. Staying close to Washington is sensible. Following blindly is not.
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