Americans should worry more about world war

Being the guy who’s always shouting about impending disaster is frustrating, thankless work. If nobody listens to you, and the disaster happens, you’re a useless Cassandra.

If nobody listens to you and the disaster luckily doesn’t happen, you’re viewed as a fool. If people do listen to you and they take action to successfully avert the disaster, a lot of people will still say that your warning was wrong and the precautions were unnecessary.

The only way you’ll ever come out looking smart is if the disaster does happen, and people heed your warning in time to mitigate its impact. At that point, you’re Gandalf. But the problem with being Gandalf is that it involves a disaster actually happening, so it’s not exactly something you should hope for.

Despite this, I think it’s our duty to warn the world of impending disaster if we think we see one coming.

I’ve been worried about a major war between the US and China since the late 2010s, when tensions started ratcheting up in the South China Sea. I wrote a post for Bloomberg in 2018 saying that the risk of war was being ignored. I felt like I was shouting into the void.

Since the pandemic, and especially since the wars in Ukraine and Gaza erupted, those worries have gone mainstream. To give just one example, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, probably the country’s most important banker, believes that the world is entering a period of geopolitical danger unrivaled since World War 2:

The comments came in an annual shareholder letter from Dimon…

“America’s global leadership role is being challenged outside by other nations and inside by our polarized electorate,” Dimon said. “We need to find ways to put aside our differences and work in partnership with other Western nations in the