In the period of most intense conflict during World War II, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin contended against Hitler, Mussolini and the leadership of Imperial Japan (primarily Hideki Tojo) for control of the world. Armies and navies circled the globe, clashed repeatedly over vast spaces. The cost in lives soared above 70 million people as a result of that cataclysm.
The peak war years occurred after Hitler had double-crossed Marshall Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. That Stalin had been our enemy the day before did not matter the day after Operation Barbarossa launched. Suddenly Stalin was part of “the big three” with Churchill and FDR.
There are many great and inspiring figures from that era who played major roles in defeating the Axis Powers, and even among the “big three,” Harry Truman would replace FDR after the latter’s death just as Clement Attlee replaced Churchill on July 26, 1945 after an election dissolved the national government after VE Day, but before VJ Day.
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU PRAISES TRUMP’S ‘REMARKABLE IDEA’ ABOUT A US TAKEOVER OF GAZA
There were so many legendary figures of enormous but still secondary importance — Generals George Marshall, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, Admirals Ernest King and Chester Nimitz and France’s great inspiration Charles DeGaulle, China’s long dueling combatants and sometimes allies against the Imperial Japanese, Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek, and a host of senior military and civilian leaders commanding armies of millions across continents.
But for much of the time there were only the five men who mattered most and who had the authority to decide the great and dread questions: Churchill, FDR, Stalin, Hitler and Tojo.
We have found ourselves in another of those moments of history where only a handful of very powerful figures make decisions for the world: United States President Donald Trump, People’s Republic of China General Secretary Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin and … Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
There are other executives with nuclear weapons in their countries’ arsenals, primarily Indian Prime Minister Modi and Pakistan’s Pakistan National Command Authority. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has a small arsenal and is erratic but not apparently suicidal. None of these powers are in anything like the current “big four.”
United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron control nuclear arsenals, but would never even think of rattling them without U.S. consent and guidance.
It is a world almost wholly dependent on four men who must be understood by the other three to be willing, if they needed to, to unleash hell on the planet in retaliation for a nuclear strike on their homeland.
This is not an imminent risk now as it was, say, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Whatever we think about Putin — and he is a war criminal — he does not seem intent on triggering Armeggedon. None of them do. The most dangerous situation is the desire for the PRC to take over Taiwan, but Xi must know that the United States and its allies would oppose such an invasion and by means quite extraordinary and sufficient to the task, via capabilities only hinted at in public. So the world is, while not peaceful, stable as to the superpowers and their potential for conflict among themselves.
But one government, possessed in the future of such a nuclear weapons arsenal, would in fact pose an imminent risk of nuclear Armageddon for it is a regime of theocrats — fanatics who may see it as their religious mission to bring about the apocalypse: The Islamic Republic of Iran.
Which is why Saturday’s pulverizing strikes against the Houthis was such an important step for President Trump to take and why I think the war against Hamas will resume soon unless Hamas releases its remaining hostages and escapes to Iran to hide there as best they can, even as Iran deconstructs its nuclear program in full view of the world. The world cannot afford fanatics with nukes and the world cannot afford a repeat of the horror of 10/7/23 when Hamas invaded Israel and slaughtered 1200, wounded 5,000 and kidnapped 250 innocents.
Other powerful countries are rising in the world that will, eventually, obtain nuclear weapons. It has to be hoped that they are all countries with regimes that do not seek an end — literally — to history. Each will seek their own paths and develop their own alliances. It is to be hoped that the People’s Republic of China wants only superpower status and not an exclusive economic zone or an invasion of Taiwan which would almost certainly trigger Cold War 2.0 to escalate to World War 3.
But for the next 45 months, at least, the United States has a president and he and a set of advisors who will simply end the Iranian regime, likely in concert with Israel and moderate Sunni states, if Iran does not move quickly to disassemble its nuclear program, now naked and exposed after 17 months of direct and indirect war with Israel.
America is back as Israel’s strong strategic partner. The Biden regency of fog and confusion is past. Putin can chose too to take the off-ramp that Trump built for him in eight weeks, but that will be the Russian dictator’s call. If Putin refuses the end of the war, Trump should rally the West to President Zelensky in ways that dwarf the feeble and trembling half-steps of the Biden Regency.
It did not take long at all for the world to see everything as it is, even if the world doesn’t see everything the U.S. has at its command, the capabilities it can use. Ten thousand commentators with opinions and no clearances or authorities, and a thousand senior commanders with clearances and authorities but no opinions, just chains of command, are on watch. Rarely has everything been this clear.
