you make some good and interesting points as always, Sol.
I hope for everyone's sake you are wrong on this account.
Thanks, but I'm small potatoes. They have guys at the Pentagon who do this sort of thing for a living. They've wargamed out every possible scenario they can think of, both in terms of narrative development but also what troop and equipment levels they would need in what places in each eventuality. What battlegroups operating in what theaters with support from what bases, and what to do if those bases are lost or those battlegroups disabled, all the way down to the nitty gritty stuff like how long it would take them to reinstitute the draft or build more F-22s or snip some undersea cables. It starts with potential diplomatic maneuvers that might unfold, and ends with body bags.
These narrative decision trees and the resulting response matrices are always being updated as new events unfold and change the probabilities. I'm guessing that working there got REAL interesting when Trump got elected and everything went to hell. Suddenly crazy shit like "maybe he'll surprise nuke North Korea" was back on the table, and they had to plan for all of it.
Just going to ignore Kyle, since Trump in 2020 is already seriously in doubt.
But I also seriously doubt we will head to world war over the course of one flawed administration. In fact, China and Russia are probably quite satisfied with ascending in the world while the US is busy fighting itself (quite possibly with more domestic shootings and natural disasters). Even North Korea will soon have it's day in the sun, by possibly playing Trump publicly in the weeks ahead.
More likely is two more years of America burning long established, hard-won bridges and losing face. Eventually our economy, our real super-power, will begin to falter as defects and fiscal irresponsibility pile up, inflation will become a problem as a result of trade wars and sanctions, the best and brightest global students will stop coming and/or leave... It'll be the accretion of a million little cuts that brings us to our knees, not war. Although we get apoplectic over the headlines and Trump's latest provocative Tweet, Trump's tenure will leave America whimpering, but no bang.
Maybe it will spur us to be better, since how can the next administration not look like anything but heroes just by doing the simple, obvious steps of rejoining our long term allies in the Paris Accord and normalizing? But America will have lost it's mandate and integrity. Although allies may breathe a sigh of relief when the insanity has halted, there will never be the level of admiration that Americans (probably unjustifiably) enjoyed pre-Trump.