War Is Coming. Will Our Next President Be Ready?

Americans on November 5 will be electing a wartime president. This isn’t a prediction. It’s reality.

Neither major-party candidate has yet spoken plainly enough to the American people about the perils represented by the growing geopolitical and defense-industrial collaboration among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. This axis of aggressors may be unprecedented in the potential peril it represents.

Neither candidate has outlined the sort of generational strategy that will be required by the United States to address this challenge. Irrespective of whether former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris is elected, these threats will be the unavoidable context of their presidency. One of them will become the commander in chief at the most dangerous moment in geopolitics since the Cold War—and perhaps since World War II.

In that spirit, the Washington Post columnist George F. Will last week compared the 2024 elections to the 1940 elections, when the United States hadn’t yet formally declared war on Imperial Japan, Hitler’s Germany, or Mussolini’s Italy.

What was different then was that one of the two candidates, the incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt, sensed that he was about to become a wartime president and was acting like one. Roosevelt, wrote Will, “was nudging a mostly isolationist nation toward involvement in a global conflict” with his 1937 “quarantine speech” on aggressor nations and through his subsequent military buildup.

Roosevelt’s opponent was the Republican businessman Wendell Willkie, who, like Roosevelt, was more internationalist than isolationist, in the tradition of his party’s elites of that time. “In three weeks,” Will wrote, “Americans will not have a comparably reassuring choice when they select the president who will determine the nation’s conduct during World War III, which has begun.”

The point is that just as World War II began with “a cascade of crises,” initiated by the coalescing axis of Japan, Germany, and Italy, so today a similar axis—of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—is taking shape. Will assesses that our current global crisis began no later than Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea.

Writing in Texas National Security Review this summer, the diplomat-historian Philip Zelikow reckoned that the next president has a 20 to 30 percent chance of being involved in worldwide warfare, which he differentiates from a world war in that not all parties will be involved in every aspect or region.

Zelikow regards the next three years as a moment of maximum danger. Should the U.S. navigate this period successfully, alongside global allies and partners, the underlying strengths of the American economy, defense industry, tech sector, and society should kick in and show their edge over those of the authoritarians.

The problem in the short term is that the U.S. is facing adversaries, in Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who may see a window of opportunity in our domestic distractions, a defense sector not yet capable of meeting the emerging challenges, and an electorate that questions the value and necessity of U.S. international engagement. Both of those foreign leaders might calculate that acting more forcefully now—against Ukraine in Putin’s case, and Taiwan in Xi’s—could produce a greater chance of success than doing so will a few years in the future.

“From Russia’s western border to the waters where China is aggressively encroaching on Philippine sovereignty,” Will wrote, “the theater of today’s wars and almost-war episodes spans six of the globe’s 24 time zones.” This, he says, is what “the gathering storm” of world war looks like, borrowing the title of the first volume of Winston Churchill’s World War II memoirs. Will charges the two presidential candidates with “reckless disregard” for failing to provide voters “any evidence of awareness of, let alone serious thinking about, the growing global conflagration.”

If that sounds like hyperbole, consider Roosevelt’s third inaugural address, in January 1941, almost a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which prompted the U.S. Congress to immediately declare war on Japan. These were his words:

To us there has come a time, in the midst of swift happenings, to pause for a moment and take stock—to recall what our place in history has been, and to rediscover what we are and what we may be. If we do not, we risk the real peril of isolation, the real peril of inaction. Lives of nations are determined not by the count of years, but by the lifetime of the human spirit.

War is not inevitable now, any more than it was then. When disregarded, however, gathering storms of the sort that we’re navigating gain strength.

“In the face of great perils never before encountered,” Roosevelt concluded, “our strong purpose is to protect and to perpetuate the integrity of democracy. For this we muster the spirit of America, and the faith of America.”

This article was adapted from a recent edition of Frederick Kempe’s newsletter at the Atlantic Council, Inflection Points.