World War III?

Tom Engelhardt

May 5, 2026

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Unlike every other TomDispatch piece, this one won’t be broken up with section titles for a simple reason. It’s all about Donald J. Trump and when it comes to him, in this strange world of ours, no one ever really gets a break.

In that context, here’s my advice to you: Don’t get old. For years, I managed not to do so, but unfortunately that’s all over now and I’m increasingly an old man. In fact, I’m not quite two years older than Donald J. Trump. I was born on July 20, 1944, while World War II was still ongoing, and he was born on June 14, 1946, in the peacetime that followed but would all too soon become the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

And let me tell you something else: these days it’s hard enough to keep the website I still run, TomDispatch, in some kind of reasonable shape, while also keeping track of our ever-stranger, more confusing, all-too-Trumpian world. But keeping track of things nationally and globally as an 80-year-old president of the United States (with another two-and-a-half years to go) in a world that seems to be coming apart at the — whoops, sorry, I can’t help it! — seams?  I simply can’t imagine that. Of course, I couldn’t imagine it for Joe Biden either, and yet he left the presidency when he was a staggering 82 years and 61 days old and will still have been younger than Trump if he truly makes it to January 20, 2029. (And both of them will have beaten the oldest Roman Emperor, Gordian I, who at 81 only lasted a few weeks in power.)

It’s hardly news that Donald Trump is now the oldest president ever to take the oath of office (twice!) and, in that sense, he’s been both record-setting and, in his own strange way, remarkable. But in case you hadn’t noticed, while he’s always had his odd moments, they are indeed getting ever odder and more frequent.  After all, how many times has this country had a president who mistook himself for (or do I mean confused himself with) Jesus Christ? Oh, wait, how could I be so confused?  That image wasn’t of Jesus but (as “our” president insisted) of a lookalike medical doctor.  (“I thought it was me as a doctor,” the president said. “Only the fake news could come up with that.”)

And meanwhile, of course, in his own ever stranger fashion, “our” president took out after Leo, the American pope, himself a veritable youth at 70 years old, calling him of all things, “WEAK on crime” and, of course, “catering to the Radical Left.” Oh, and while he was at it, Trump also posted an image of himself being hugged by (yes, of course!) Jesus. And Leo responded to the president’s abuse by all too accurately deploring a world being “ravaged by a handful of tyrants” (including, of course, You Know Exactly Whom).

Just in case you hadn’t noticed, as an imperial power (even, historically speaking, the imperial power, the only one at its height to control quite so much of the planet in one fashion or another), this country, too, is growing ever older and (again) in its own strange fashion going down (as, of course, all great imperial powers do sooner or later). Phew! That was a long sentence for this old guy, but you can’t get too long and complicated (or do I mean confused?) when it comes to the world of Donald J. Trump. In electing him a second time in 2024, 49.8% of American voters clearly opted to go down in style by giving imperial oldness a startling new meaning.

These days, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that Trump’s approval ratings are heading for the planetary basement.  As I was writing this piece, for instance, only 31% of Americans approved of how he was handling the economy. (Of course, you might wonder, at this point, why it wasn’t 11% or even 0%.) Meanwhile, Vice President J.D. Vance’s approval ratings, too, have been hitting historic lows.

Mind you, Donald Trump has always given unpredictability new meaning, but these days, a constant version of unpredictability is his aging middle name. Remember the president who was against “warmongers and America-last globalists” and was going to remove them from office in his second term in the White House?  Remember the president who was going to “turn the page forever on those foolish, stupid days of never-ending wars”? Hmmm, well, think again (and again and again!) now that he’s gone to war (or is it to peace, or even to pieces?) with Iran in an all too strikingly destructive fashion. But that’s today’s news and, in the era of the aging Donald Trump, who knows what tomorrow might hold for any of us (or, for that matter, what might happen an hour from now)? Count on one thing, though: “our” president sure doesn’t know and so, sadly, neither can we.

(Phew! Without section breaks, I’m already exhausted, but who can truly take a break when it comes to Donald Trump?)

And here’s what might be the saddest thing of all (not that all of it isn’t sad as hell, and potentially leading the rest of us all too literally into a hell on earth): given this country’s military machine, which “the peace president” seems eager to feed an extra $500 billion (and no, that’s not a typo!), which would raise the Pentagon budget by an exceedingly modest 50%, the United States still has the power to turn this planet into a hell on Earth in a fashion no other imperial power in decline has ever been able to do. (And I’m not even thinking about this country’s vast nuclear arsenal.)

So, here’s our horrifying reality: in the next two and a half years, if, of course, he doesn’t either keel over tomorrow or somehow grab even more time as president — remember that, last year in Iowa, which he won in all three of his election campaigns, he asked an audience ominously, “Should we do it a fourth time?” — Donald J. Trump is genuinely capable of preparing to take not just this country but the planet down with him. Phew again!

And I’m not just thinking about his ability (if that’s faintly the word for it) with allies like Israel to turn parts of this world into hell zones of war. I’m thinking instead about the climate disaster to come and the president who has called it “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and a “green scam,” and is prepared in his own fashion to heat this planet to the boiling point. (And keep in mind that the U.S. military is the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases, even in peacetime, on Planet Earth.)

Honestly, I still find it hard to imagine that a near majority of American voters elected such a distinctly disturbed old man as president yet again, one seemingly intent on squashing green energy of any sort and potentially taking this planet down with him the second time around. Consider it truly strange, in fact (or do I mean: consider it unstrange beyond words) that the two oldest presidents in our history (Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and, yes!, Donald Trump again) have occupied the White House consecutively for the last decade, given that this country is now distinctly an aging, even potentially, fading power on a planet that may itself be aging and fading all too rapidly.

I’m old enough to have experienced 15 presidents in my lifetime so far (and that’s not even counting Trump the second time around) and yet he is distinctly, day by day, month by month, year by year, one of a kind in the worst sense imaginable. Consider it odd, in fact, that, as a con artist first class, he may himself turn out to be the greatest con job ever perpetrated on this world of ours and, in his own eerie fashion, a world-ending figure. Worse yet, whether we like it or not, it seems as if we are all now his apprentices.

Imagine as well that making war and “unleashing” ever more coal, oil, and natural gas are the two things he seems to be specializing in during his second term in office, even if, thanks to his conflict with Iran, he actually put a sudden limit on the global distribution of oil and gas via the Strait of Hormuz and helped (in his own fashion) and with a distinct hand from Iran to clobber the big oil producers of the Middle East.

(Whew! If only I could put a section break up right here and take a break myself! Facing such a world and such a president, this old writer finds himself increasingly out of breath!)

You know, if, when I was young and when, in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the youthful John F. Kennedy was president, you had even tried to describe Donald Trump’s version of the world to me, I would have thought you not just literally mad, but one of the worst creators of fiction around. Can there be the slightest doubt, in fact, that President Trump has indeed turned out to be among the worst creations of a planet that couldn’t be in deeper trouble?

I wanted to write “fictional creations” there. If only this were indeed a grim dystopian novel, rather than the actual world, and if Donald Trump himself were indeed some mad fictional creation. What a thrill that would be! After all, such a weird and wild version of a Philip Roth noveI would once have seemed to readers like a mad laugh-a-thon.

If only…

But when the voters of your very own country decide to make just such a fiction our reality a second time around in this all too real world, you know that something is truly wrong on Planet Earth.

In a sense, Donald Trump could be thought of as the way, after this country’s endless decades of imperial war-making from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq, and now to Iran (and that’s leaving out plenty of our warring activities), we Americans decided not just to make war on the rest of the world but on ourselves as well. And by reelecting a man who proudly insists that climate change is the “greatest con job ever perpetuated” and a total “green new scam,” we’re obviously involving ourselves in a big-time fashion in what might be thought of as World War III, the ultimate war on planet Earth itself.

I mean, you have to feel anxious when you only have to put “Donald Trump, climate change” into your computer search window and up come endless disturbing pieces, including, for me just now, Maxine Joselow of the New York Times writing an article headlined (rather mildly under the circumstances) “Climate Change Denial Sees a Resurgence in Trump’s Washington.” It began this way:

“Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by ‘leftist politicians.’ Fossil fuels are the greenest energy sources. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be harmless. These were some of the false claims made at a conference on Wednesday held by groups that reject the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. What might have seemed like a fringe event in years past this time boasted a prominent keynote speaker: Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and one of President Trump’s possible choices for the next attorney general.”

Tell that, of course, to all of us in New York City, who only recently lived through record-breaking 90-degree July weather in early April. Consider it strange indeed that, in response to the never-ending news that we humans have long been turning this planet into a fossil-fuelized hothouse, a near majority of us would indeed opt to again elect a president who makes climate-change denial seem like a far too mild term.

Of all the things that Donald Trump hasn’t done, he’s worked in what, for him, is a remarkably organized fashion to stall or nix any projects that wouldn’t further heat this planet of ours. Utterly unfocused as he so often is, he’s remained strikingly focused on shutting down wind power and solar energy projects, while launching ever more fossil-fuel ones, including opening more than a billion acres of coastal waters to oil and gas drilling and paying a French company almost a billion dollars not to create two wind farms off this country’s east coast, but instead to invest in oil and gas projects here in the U.S.

Talk about dystopian! Donald Trump should truly be considered a full-scale dystopian nightmare playing out in real time.

Wait! I have a last urge for this piece. Think of it as a way for me to finally catch my breath. To end it, I want to create one of those missing section heads right here, right now. How about:

The Hothouse President on a Planet Going to Hell

[And yes, that is indeed the end of this piece, but not for a moment the end of the nightmare we’re now living through.]

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

How Russia’s Backwardness Benefits Putin

John Feffer

 May 5, 2026

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Photo by Brad Ritson

The source of Russia’s global power derives not from sophisticated technology, an advanced service sector, or a cadre of entrepreneurs. Russia’s power is almost entirely backward-looking. Its geopolitical position rests on a base of prehistoric vegetation.

That vegetation, of course, has ended up as Russia’s reserves of oil, natural gas, and coal. About one-quarter of the country’s government revenues comes from fossil fuel sales. Those revenues ensure that Russia’s superpower status can’t be boiled down simply to its possession of nuclear weapons. Russia is not “Upper Volta with nukes” as the Soviet Union was famously dismissed. Petrodollars give it considerable geopolitical leverage as well as the means to wage war, most recently in Ukraine.

Consider how crudely Russia uses its crude. For some time, the dependency of certain European countries on Russian fuel imports—notably Hungary and Slovakia—has made it challenging for the European Union to forge consensus on anything related to Russia or Ukraine. Leadership change in Hungary has reduced, though not eliminated, this problem. The election of Peter Magyar has simultaneously gotten money flowing again from Brussels to Kyiv and oil flowing again, via the Druzhba pipeline, from Russia to Hungary.

It’s not just Eastern Europe. Although Europe as a whole has radically reduced imports over the last five years—from 45 percent of its gas imports to 19 percent and 27 percent of its oil to 3 percent—France, the Netherlands, and Belgium are still importing considerable amounts. Last year, the prime minister of Belgium blocked the use of Russian funds frozen in Brussels to help Ukraine. When money is blocked, follow the oil (also, don’t discount outright intimidation).

Russia, in other words, has used its energy exports to drive wedges between countries that might otherwise be allies.

These energy exports, subjected to sanctions and price caps, have also strengthened Russian ties with China and India, with those two countries combining to purchase 80 percent of Russian oil. Especially now, with the war in Iran and the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, Russian energy beckons as a lifeline for many countries. Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy infrastructure have cut into the profits, but sales are still up.

Russia’s chief asset is also its chief weakness. Even before it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia depended a little too much on its own natural resources. Instead of investing in greater value-added production, Russia took the easier route of selling what it could extract from the ground, in the form of minerals and fossil fuels and timber. Like other countries caught in a “resource curse,” Russia lazily failed to diversity.

Windfall profits have also fueled corruption, from the Black Sea palaces of Gazprom officials to the money-laundering associated with Russia’s ghost fleet of aging tankers. Like Norway, a country that has singularly avoided the resource curse, Russia has a national wealth fund. But much of it has gone to pay for the war in Ukraine, as well as serving to “launder money, evade sanctions, and secure resources for both influence campaigns and military needs.” Russia ranks 157 out of 182 countries in the Transparency International index of corruption perceptions, lower than Iran and Congo.

It’s tempting to conclude that Russian politics is to blame for this lack of diversification. Vladimir Putin has cultivated a set of friendly oligarchs who have subordinated their economic decisions to the needs of the state. Diversification could disrupt this cozy relationship. The Russian economy has not been performing spectacularly—booming when commodity prices are up, plummeting when those prices drop—but it is good enough to sustain public support for the current government.

Let’s push this argument further.

Between the middle of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries, a succession of tsars continued to maintain serfdom in the face of rising protests and thwarted revolution. The Russian royals considered this unpaid labor to be integral to the Russian economy of the time. But as Marshall Berman argued in his pioneering study of modernism, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, keeping the serfs in bondage also ensured that Russian landlords and other wealthy individuals would not invest in the kind of modernization taking place in Western Europe and the United States. The tsars understood that such modernization would create pressures for political reform that might dislodge the tsars themselves. It wouldn’t be until 1861 that Tsar Alexander II freed the millions and millions of serfs in Russia.

Likewise, Vladimir Putin may well understand that modernizing the Russian economy away from reliance on natural resources would create other potential centers of power. Imagine a Russian Silicon Valley, for instance, wealthy enough to support rival political candidates and finance a wave of disruptive entrepreneurs. Despite his claims to the contrary, Putin is content with his country’s underdevelopment. Better that entrepreneurs like Pavel Durov of Telegram fame has relocated to Dubai—that’s one less independent-minded oligarch who could cause trouble at home.

Russia produces enough wealth to maintain a rickety social welfare system and sustain the war in Ukraine. Anything more might upend the pyramid of power. Underdevelopment keeps Putin in control.

Russian Economy Today

In the first two months of 2026, the Russian economy shrank compared to its performance last year. These figures prompted Putin to scold his underlings, demanding that they give him “detailed reports today on the current economic situation and on why the trajectory of macroeconomic indicators is currently falling short of expectations.” The lack of growth is a symptom of structural problems as are high interest rates and endemic inflation. Throw in a serious budget deficit and the Russian economy is on the precipice—or, at least, in the fast lane going in that direction.

Okay, these figures come from before the start of the Iran War, which has functioned like a Hail Mary pass from the Trump administration to Putin in the end zone. The increase in energy and commodity prices will inevitably restore growth to the Russian economy—but also forestall any serious changes that could address the underlying structural weaknesses.

The dividends from the Iran War might not even be enough to treat the symptoms. According to Thomas Nilsson, head of Sweden’s Military Intelligence and Security Service, oil prices would have to rise above $100 a barrel for more than a year to erase Russia’s budget deficit. Nilsson argues, moreover, that Russia is inflating its economic statistics to mask the damage that corruption, mismanagement, and wrong-headed policies have inflicted. There might be an element of wishful thinking here, since the Swedes are urging a more forceful policy of aiding Ukraine in the hopes that a tanking Russian economy will force a peace deal favorable to Kyiv.

Still, the war in Ukraine is certainly not making matters any easier for the Kremlin. In addition to the sheer cost of the campaign and the repairs to the infrastructure Ukraine has destroyed, the need for soldiers and the out-migration of the disgruntled have put serious pressure on the labor market. Even if the state pushed for diversification, it would be hard-pressed to find a workforce to train for the new jobs.

Last week, worried about the lack of growth, the central bank cut interest rates to 14.5 percent. Even in the face of high inflation, the money managers are desperate to pump money into the economy. The bankers acknowledge that the Iran War won’t save Russia. “A significant risk from external conditions is the situation in the Middle East,” the governor of the central, Elvira Nabiullina, said. “If the conflict drags on, the negative effects on the Russian economy will grow.” Veteran politician Gennady Zyuganov, the reliably nationalist head of the Communist Party, even warned the Duma of the risks of a 1917-type revolution if the government doesn’t improve the economy, and soon.

In other words, Putin’s reliance on the troika of fossil fuels, corruption, and autocracy to prevent a political challenge to his authority may end up producing the very revolt from below he fears the most.

Color Revolutions

To avoid the scenarios that produced political change in Russia’s neighbors—Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova—Putin has ruthlessly suppressed all potential political challenges. He has jailed opponents, had them assassinated, or forced them into exile. He closed down independent media. He passed a foreign agent law that effectively criminalized NGOs.

Opposition to the government is now expressed elliptically, much like the Soviet Union of old. Influencers complain about the shuttering of the Telegram messaging app and eroding living standards, but they also opine, to avoid charges of anti-Putinism, that maybe the supreme leader has been fed misinformation (a ludicrous notion that nevertheless has deep roots in Russian history).

Although his popularity has dipped to 65 percent, Putin is probably not worried about critical Instagram content. Economic discontent is another matter. Rising prices triggered the first Arab Spring protests in Tunisia. Anger over the cost of living and corruption led to the downfall of the Bulgarian government in December.

In the end, Russians can’t eat oil or gas or coal. The country has to provide jobs other than cannon fodder and coal miner. Underdevelopment suppresses the political demands associated with modernization—until it doesn’t. Perhaps Putin thinks that he can push the envelope long enough to capture the rest of the Donbas and deliver a “win” to the Russian people to offset all of their sacrifices. Ukraine—assisted by the rest of the anti-autocratic world—is betting everything that he can’t. War, even in this era of rapid-fire AI targeting, remains a waiting game.

John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus, where this article originally appeared.