Has the Third World War Begun?

You will remember Fiona Hill, a National Security Council Russian specialist who testified in the former president's first impeachment trial.  This image of her is from The New Yorker magazine.

Hill is what I would call a steely-eyed realist about Russia, as opposed to the Pootin Poodles, whose membership includes the former president, Tucker Carlson, Sen. Josh Harkins, and professional Christian Pat Robertson.

In this interview in Politico, Hill points out that history is a continuum, despite our habit of dividing it into neat, unrelated episodes. 

Reynolds: The more we talk, the more we’re using World War II analogies. There are people who are saying we’re on the brink of a World War III.

Hill: We’re already in it. We have been for some time. We keep thinking of World War I, World War II as these huge great big set pieces, but World War II was a consequence of World War I. And we had an interwar period between them. And in a way, we had that again after the Cold War. Many of the things that we’re talking about here have their roots in the carving up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire at the end of World War I. At the end of World War II, we had another reconfiguration and some of the issues that we have been dealing with recently go back to that immediate post-war period. We’ve had war in Syria, which is in part the consequence of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, same with Iraq and Kuwait.

All of the conflicts that we’re seeing have roots in those earlier conflicts. We are already in a hot war over Ukraine, which started in 2014. People shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that we’re just on the brink of something. We’ve been well and truly in it for quite a long period of time.

What we have been able to do, since World War II, is establish a rules-based world order.

Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just for which countries can or cannot be in NATO, or between democracies and autocracies, but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force. Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this. Yes, there may be countries like China and others who might think that this is permissible, but overall, most countries have benefited from the current international system in terms of trade and economic growth, from investment and an interdependent globalized world. 

This is pretty much the end of this. That’s what Russia has done. 

It is important to point out – especially to China – that China's rise, too, was based on this rules-based system. Forty years ago China was weak. They were able to grow into the manufacturing powerhouse they are only because American ships plied Asian waters and protected all those container ships on their way to create a Chinese trade surplus with the United States. China will upset the rules-based system (as they seemed determined to do) at the risk of their own economy.

Anyway, read the whole interview with Fiona Hill here.