Wars often begin with single events – flashpoints. The Great War – World War I – began with the assassination of a minor Eastern European noble, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, by a Bosnian Serb student. The second chapter of that conflict, World War II, began arguably with the invasion of Manchuria by Japan in 1931, while the European theater of that war began after a long series of provocations with Hitler’s and Stalin’s invasion of Poland.
The flashpoint that brought the United States into that latter conflict was, of course, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
What flashpoint might start a third world war? On Fox Business, retired General Jack Keane recently voiced some thoughts.
The U.S. is treading on ground not seen since World War II, according to senior strategic analyst and retired four-star Gen. Jack Keane, who warned that “we’re on a pathway” to a third world war.
Keane said that he does not “react to candidates’ comments because I don’t want to influence voters,” but stated that a recent congressional commission on the Biden administration’s national defense strategy that he took part in revealed that the threat of another major war is very real.
What’s interesting here is Gen. Keane’s views on how American leadership is viewed abroad, and he’s certainly not alone in his concern that the leadership of the United States is broadly viewed by the rest of the world as weak and ineffective – probably because it is weak and ineffective. And bad actors around the world are taking advantage of it.
Keane pointed out that there was a change in the behavior of U.S. adversaries that occurred between the Biden and Trump administrations.
“What has fundamentally changed from one administration to the other is Russia, China, Iran and North Korea working together, collaborating, coordinating, and truly helping each other,” he stressed. “And the fact that they perceive the United States as being weak, and they’re going to take advantage of it, so they have been incentivized by their perception of us.”
General Keane has some valid concerns:
“It’s no isolated event that there’s war in Europe for the first time since World War II on a major scale, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” he said. [It’s] “no accident that, or isolated event, that what’s taking place in the Middle East where Iran has operationalized all of their proxies to stranglehold Israel into making people stop living there and destroy the state of Israel and push the United States out of the region.”
“And President Xi’s aggression has increased dramatically,” he added of the Chinese leader.
Keane reiterated the commission’s conclusion that the U.S. has “not seen a period of time like this since World War II” and warned of what may be to come.
So, what might the flashpoint be that starts another global war?