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Editor's note: With the election just days away, Today, Explained is devoting this week to looking at the highly consequential stakes of the presidential election for the world, for immigrants, and more.

Today, Joshua Keating, Vox's senior correspondent covering foreign policy, explores how a Trump presidency would react to a global situation that's far more complex — and infinitely more dangerous — than even eight years ago. 

No less an authority than Vladimir Putin has predicted that the coming years in global affairs will be a “revolutionary situation”: a reference to a line of Vladimir Lenin’s from 1913, just prior to World War I. 

This doesn’t mean World War III is inevitable or even likely. But it does mean we are in an era when the decisions of major leaders in moments of crisis could have an outsize impact on global security and the lives of millions.

This also is the moment when Donald Trump may return to the presidency.

When Trump was elected in 2016 it didn’t exactly feel like a very peaceful or stable moment in world history. The Syrian civil war and the US-led campaign against ISIS were raging. In June, one of the terror group’s sympathizers killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando. Russian-backed forces were occupying much of Eastern Ukraine and shot down a Malaysian airliner. Ted Cruz was terrifying 3-year-olds on the campaign trail by telling them the world was “on fire.”

And yet, viewed from the vantage point of this year, 2016 feels like a simpler time. Wars of all types have gotten more common and deadlier, and superpower conflict — a concern that had largely receded in the post-Cold War era — is back on the agenda.

In short, the global situation Trump would inherit if he were elected this time around would be far more dangerous and unpredictable. And that in turn raises the risks of his erratic and transactional approach to foreign policy.

What was, eight years ago, a localized “gray zone” conflict in Eastern Ukraine is now the first major land war in Europe in decades, one in which Russia’s president has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons. Israel’s war in Gaza, already one of the deadliest conflicts for civilians of the 20th century, is fast spiraling into a regional conflict.

Further east, potentially even more dangerous conflicts loom. Many North Korea watchers believe the country is preparing for war, and that the risk of all-out conflict on the Korean peninsula — which could potentially kill more than a million people, even if North Korea doesn’t use its nuclear arsenal — has never been higher.

Then there’s Taiwan, where a war would mean a body blow to the global economy. If the US came to Taiwan’s aid, it could lose as many troops in a matter of weeks as it did in 20 years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some analysts believe China could even preemptively attack US bases in the Pacific if it believed US intervention was inevitable, something the US military has not experienced since WWII. And the threat of nuclear weapons use would loom over the conflict: China has the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, one that is growing fast.

None of this is to downplay the wars and security threats that existed in 2016 and continued through Trump’s presidency, nor the obviously massive disruptive effect of the Covid pandemic. But state vs. state conflict, and even superpower vs. superpower conflict, is an entirely different matter than war against terrorist groups.   Recent rapid advances in drone technology and artificial intelligence are likely to make the wars of the future all the more unpredictable, and potentially more destructive.

All of which makes the idea of putting back in the Oval Office a president who proudly calls his foreign policy approach “crazy” so dangerous.

Even putting aside the issues of Trump’s temperament, mental acuity, or the warnings from multiple senior national security officials from his own past administration that they believe he is dangerously unqualified for the presidency, there are several reasons to believe that a new Trump presidency would amplify this “revolutionary situation” rather than moderate it.

First, Trump does not put much value in the idea of territorial integrity. We tend to take for granted that in our current era, countries rarely conquer each other and borders are rarely changed by force. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has obviously challenged this taboo against what the UN Charter calls the “threat or use of force against the territorial integrity” of other countries.

As president, Trump reportedly told other world leaders that the Crimean peninsula, which was illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014, is rightfully Russian because everyone there speaks Russian. Figures close to the Trump campaign like Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk have openly endorsed the view that Crimea is rightfully Russian.

Trump overturned decades of US policy and international consensus by recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which he has described as a snap decision made after a quick history lesson from his ambassador to Israel and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. He did the same for Morocco’s claims over the disputed region of Western Sahara, in return for Morocco recognizing Israel. (In fairness, the Biden administration hasn’t reversed either of these moves — once the taboo is broken, it’s hard to reestablish.)

 For Trump, the president who after all, mused about buying Greenland, sovereignty and territorial integrity are like anything else in a deal: negotiable.

Second, Trump doesn’t value alliances. He tends to take a narrowly transactional view of them.  His antipathy to NATO and threats to pull the US out of the alliance have been well-documented, as have his comments that treat the US defense of Asian partners like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan as a protection racket.

The third point is Trump’s attitude toward nuclear weapons. Defying many predictions made at the dawn of the nuclear age, no nuclear weapon has been used in war since 1945,  likely thanks to both a bit of luck as well as the power of nuclear deterrence and the very justified fear these weapons cause. Trump, though, seems a bit more blase on the topic.

According to former aides, Trump discussed using a nuclear weapon against North Korea as president during the period he was publicly threatening Kim Jong Un’s regime with “fire and fury.” As president, he withdrew, or let lapse a number of key arms control treaties, most famously the Iran nuclear deal, instead preferring an approach where the US would build up its own nuclear arsenal to spend its rivals into oblivion. Recently on the campaign trail, he suggested that a reason presidents need legal immunity is so they could use nuclear weapons without fear of legal repercussions.

 A number of US allies in Europe and Asia are now actively debating over whether they need nuclear deterrents of their own, driven in part by concerns over whether they could actually count on the US nuclear umbrella.  

Ultimately, the question is not whether Trump is a hawk or a dove. It’s what a return of the chaos and unpredictability that marked his first tenure will mean in a world where the risk of cataclysm is now so much higher.

Read the full story here.

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Today’s edition was produced and edited by senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan, with contributions from staff editor Melinda Fakuade. We'll see you tomorrow!

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