U.S. President Donald Trump walks as he attends to host a back-to-school-themed event to highlight his administration's education policies, in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 24, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
President Donald Trump appears to be ignoring a "gathering storm" that could tip the world into a total war, according to a new column.
What global conflicts like Ukraine's war against Russian aggression and Trump's war against Iran have exposed, according to a new essay from New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, is that the U.S. is ill-prepared to enter a global conflict as the country did during World War II. That poses a significant risk, Stephens argued, for the global order.
"In periods of economic distress, democracies almost always become more risk-averse, while dictatorships become risk-prone," Stephens wrote. "That’s a pattern of history worth recalling as we continue to drift, only dimly aware, toward the gathering storm."
He pointed to issues like Trump's sputtering economy and the infighting the president has provoked among Western allies as key differences between today's conflicts and World War II. Those trends threaten to hinder the ability of the West to thwart the operationally militarized axis of dictatorships that Russian President Vladimir Putin has assembled, Stephens added.
All of this could be made much worse if the U.S. tips into a recession, which became a little more likely after Trump escalated a trade war with Canada, causing the country to slap retaliatory tariffs on billions of dollars worth of American goods.
"President Trump complains of our allies’ weakness. The allies complain of Trump’s bullying, capriciousness, callowness, mendacity and incompetence. Both sides are right. The latest U.S. tariff salvo on Canada is a case in point: politically ill-advised, economically self-defeating, strategically enervating," the columnist explained.