Hillary Clinton Is Right: Donald Trump Threatens World War III - By Jonathan Alter

In her DNC speech, the nominee laid out why her opponent risks toppling the world order. Why the war-and-peace conversation is not only fair—it’s necessary.

One of the best lines in Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech came when she quoted Jackie Kennedy’s relief that “little men” weren’t in charge during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world came, as Robert McNamara once told me, “just inches” from nuclear war.

If the Republican candidate for president can be “baited with a tweet,” as Clinton so memorably put it—if that disqualifies him from handling nuclear weapons, as she said—then the risk of World War III should be an issue in the 2016 campaign. Beyond his manifestly unsuitable temperament, Donald Trump will “endanger the world as we know it,” as Sen. Cory Booker put it. If you bust up the architecture of the postwar world—as Trump is threatening to do, either intentionally or out of ignorance—the war-and-peace conversation is not only fair, but necessary.

In that sense, this election may be a bit like 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson ran an ad against Republican challenger Barry Goldwater of a little girl picking a daisy while a mushroom cloud explodes in the background. It was a harsh attack, and only ran once, but it reflected deep unease about Goldwater undermining the structure of global relationships that kept the peace. “These are the stakes,” LBJ intones, as a nuclear weapon detonates.

These are the stakes this time, too. We know from history that appeasement invites war. For all his bluster, Trump has already shown himself to be an appeaser, from his “America First” slogan to his strange unwillingness to utter even a single word of criticism for Russian President and former KGB chief Vladimir Putin, one of the only major figures in the world to escape his insults (Trump, remember, even attacked the pope).

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