December 28, 2022

By David Jay Morris

World War III.

For most of us, these words instantly evoke apocalyptic images of nuclear Armageddon.

Life as we know it ending in a mushroom cloud.

Could it happen?

Of course it could.  Given the dangers posed by the Ukraine War, increased tension with China and a host of other crisis bubbling up around the world, the Doomsday clock remains at 100 seconds to midnight.

Much too close for comfort.

Still, things could also fall out in quite a different way.  If, as the Christians believe, fire is what will get us next time, perhaps the blaze won’t come in one massive blast from the detonation of hundreds of thermonuclear devices.  Could it be instead spread out over years from the tiny, but repeated, repeated and repeated again ignitions of trillions of spark plugs in our internal combustion engines?

Maybe World War III is something else entirely.

Could it be instead a war to determine if humanity’s future will lie with freedom and democracy or autocracy and subjugation?

Could it be that this war has already begun?

Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskyy certainly seems to think so.  In his historic speech to the U.S. Congress, he stated:

Yes, this battle is not only for the territory, for this or another part of Europe. The battle is not only for life, freedom, and security of Ukrainians or any other nation which Russia attempts to conquer. This struggle will define in what world our children and grandchildren will live, and then their children and grandchildren.

It will define whether it will be a democracy for Ukrainians and for Americans — for all.

If we are already in the midst of World War III, but it is not an all-out, apocalyptic exchange of nuclear weapons, some important questions arise.

First, what exactly is the nature of the conflict?

A good model for it can be found in the executive summary of a report on “The Evolution of Russian Hybrid Warfare” published in January, 2021 by The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), a nonprofit think tank based in Washington DC, “focused on the strengthening of the transatlantic alliance.”  To quote a few especially relevant passages:

Russia sows chaos to achieve its agenda beyond its borders by deploying an array of hybrid warfare tools. This “chaos strategy” calculates that a relatively weakened Kremlin can…compete by splintering its opponents’ alliances, dividing them internally, and undermining their political systems.

Russia has seeded chaos via asymmetrical means through disinformation, cyberattacks, political subversion, business ties, and economic warfare, among other tools.

In this context, Russian operations must lead to information and psychological dominance of the enemy. These concepts eradicate the line between peace and war, placing politics and armed conflict in the same category.

In short, a combination of old school kinetic war and modern methods of disinformation, propaganda and influence operations aimed at splintering, undermining and destabilizing one’s enemy.

In the case of Russia and its ideological allies, that means us – supporters of democracy around the world, led by the United States.

That takes us to our second question.  Who exactly are our enemies?

The top of the list is obvious.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia. 

Its war crimes in Ukraine – starting with the illegal and utterly immoral invasion itself – puts that country and its despot in a class by itself.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Looking at the world through the Russians’ own hybrid warfare lens, what else should we make of their efforts to undermine the west, but that they were deliberate attacks.  Early skirmishes in World War III.

The most successful of these was unquestionably their support of Donald Trump’s 2016 run for the White House, without which he would almost certainly have failed. 

In the wake of January 6th, we now know just how much damage this has done to the United States, its rule of law, and its democratic system of government.

The list of our enemies must, therefore, include all of the Putin-loving democracy deniers in the United States – starting, of course, with Trump himself – but also including a large slice of the insurrectionist MAGA crowd.

Long-time Putin lover and Trump enabler Steve Bannon seems to agree that the battle has been joined…and that he is NOT on our side. 

Seeing the former guy’s buffoonish “major announcement” that pseudo-macho fantasy Trump NFT “cards” had gone on sale, Bannon was appalled.  With a disgusted look on his face, he said, “We are at war,” profoundly disappointed that his commander-in-chief wasn’t announcing an ingenious new stratagem, but just another petty grift.

True believer in autocracy that he appears to be, Bannon clearly didn’t think that this is what a leader ought to be doing in a time of war.  Rather, he has expressed his admiration for Putin and his “anti-woke” and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and policies.

At this moment in time, with a hot war raging in Europe between the forces of Russian despotism and Ukrainian lovers of freedom and democracy, and equally intense political warfare taking place in the US and elsewhere, it’s worth noting that Bannon is far from the only American Putinista.

A 2017 article by the People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch gives some idea of his fellow travelers:

The examples of far-right Americans praising the Kremlin are as myriad as they are obvious. For Richard Spencer, the coiner of the term “Alt-Right” and a leader of the emerging white nationalist faction it represents, Russia is both the “sole” and “most powerful white power in the world.” Matthew Heimbach, head of the white nationalist Traditionalist Worker Party—and someone who, like Spencer, desires the creation of a whites-only nation-state within the U.S.—believes Russian President Vladimir Putin is the “leader of the free world.” Harold Covington, the white supremacist head of the secessionist Northwest Front, recently described Russia as the “last great White empire.” And former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke has said he believes Russia holds the “key to white survival.”

And since then, it’s only gotten worse. Take a look at what Russia’s state media has been saying in the wake of President Zelinskyy’s visit to the U.S.

Right-wing Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) won a significant new fan — Kremlin state TV — for refusing to stand and applaud Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky when he spoke to Congress in Washington, D.C., last Wednesday.

The broadcast also gave shout outs to Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) and far-right Fox News host Tucker Carlson for dissing the leader.

While many flash points exist in this world-wide conflict, without question, the two key battlegrounds are the killing fields of Ukraine, and the no-holds-barred right-wing effort to undermine and destroy democracy in the United States.  The ongoing attempt to, as Trump put it, terminate “all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

Can we win this war?

In a word, yes.

With virtually the whole country united in defense of its culture and freedom, Ukraine has done remarkably well.  It has shown us the true meaning of “people power.” 

With enough ammunition and a few more advanced weapons systems, the Ukrainians could very well bring about the wholesale defeat of the Russian invaders.

Putin’s only answers to his battlefield failures have been to loudly rattle his nuclear saber and launch massive missile and air attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure in order to make the lives of ordinary Ukrainian civilians as miserable as possible. 

He hopes this will weaken their will and lead them to surrender.

It won’t.

Here in the U.S. too, the good guys have been doing pretty well.

Trump’s lackeys did remarkably badly in the 2022 midterms and key levers of power remain in the hands of people who will use them responsibly.

In the battle for public opinion…for people’s hearts…Trump and his cadre of democracy deniers also seem to have lost a significant amount of support.  More and more lifelong conservatives seem to be reawakening to the fact that American democracy is the very thing they most want to conserve.  And, that MAGA Republicans are the true radicals bent on destroying it.

Trump’s own snowballing legal trouble and increasingly demented behavior are also helping immensely.  With such a mountain of evidence before us of just how corrupt, immoral and anti-American he is, and has always been, it’s becoming more and more difficult for anyone with the slightest understanding of democracy to support him.

There are signs that Trump’s coalition of crazy might be starting to fracture, but more remains to be done.

Until the radical right – the American Putinists, the white (pseudo) Christian nationalists, the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and their wannabee militias, the Q-Anon conspiracy cult, are put back into the lunatic fringe box in which they belong, we are still in danger.

For this to happen, the movement needs to fracture completely.  Bit-by-bit, the saner one-time Trump supporters are peeling away, but Donald the Deceiver still hasn’t reached his Waterloo. 

To help him on his way, we who oppose him need to keep on seeking out the stress points in his coalition and hammering them hard.

With his visit, President Zelinskyy might have exposed one of the most vulnerable fracture points of all.  The large majority of Republicans in Congress, and around the country, clearly support him and the heroic struggle of his countrymen.  But Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Boebert, Hawley, Bannon, Tucker Carlson and their ilk prefer Putin and his gang of war criminals.

Let’s use this horrific fact to drive another wedge between them.

When Putin is crushed on the battlefield, Trump is in prison where he belongs, Trumpism has been thoroughly discredited and rejected, and the most toxic of the right-wing fringe has crawled back under the rocks from which they came, we might at last be able to say that World War III has been won.