World War III is already here, and Trump must rise to the challenge

The early stages of what could become World War III are already upon us. 

The current global conflict began in 1917 after the Russian Revolution, which threatened to spread its authoritarian economic and political ideology to the entire world. The battle of ideas that has prevailed for more than a century since then was interrupted first by World War I, a more conventional nationalistic and territorial conflict. 

Two decades later came World War II, in which traditional territorial expansion was undergirded with a new set of totalitarian ideologies — those of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan.  Those axis powers opposed Communist Russia but shared its commitment to total control of populations, both domestic and foreign.

Both world wars ended with the total defeat of the aggressors and with America in the vanguard of the global struggle between democracy and autocracy. As such, the U.S. resumed its active opposition to the Soviet Union and the tyrannies it spawned. These now included China, North Korea, parts of Southeast Asia, and other places in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Meanwhile, however, communism as practiced in Russia, postwar China, and North Korea, evolved away from the messianic internationalist ideology of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin and toward the cult-like deranged systems under Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Kim Il-sung. Their like-minded successor dictators — Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong-un — carry on the suppression of their restive populations and the violent threats to peaceful neighbors.

Whatever the precise form of totalitarianism today, all these tyrannical systems have long shared a deep-seated hostility toward the U.S-led democratic model of governance with its certainty of regular regime change only through the routinely expressed will of the people rather than by either heredity or the exercise of brute force. 

Hopefully, in the present conflict dynamic, if the Trump administration acts wisely, firmly, and consistently, supported by Congress and allies,........

© The Hill