He's going to start WW lll, isn't he?

[mike_c]

12. Winston Churchill believed that NATO is all that stands...

...between Europe and another world war. Most people alive today don't recall the cycle of arming, conquest, and destruction that wracked Europe at roughly twenty-ish year intervals in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the subsequent conflagrations they spawned around the world. In the 1940s it was obvious to everyone. NATO and the United Nations were both created specifically to prevent another European war. They have been successful so far, more-or-less. Conflicts that have occurred were overcome before they spread.

Trump and his minions are playing with fire. The European world wars were unique because each redefined the nature and horror of war. War exerts it's own brand of natural selection on the military-science-industrial machinery of belligerents. Nations went to war in 1917 with cavalry still on horseback and field artillery little changed since the previous century. By 1945 armies were capable of exterminating entire cities at the press of a button, and the alliance that defeated Hitler was breaking apart in animosity. Churchill and FDR both believed that a third world war was inevitable unless European conflicts could be extinguished by agencies designed from the outset to keep the peace. Trump is gleefully undoing all they accomplished, just to sow chaos.