“World War Three has never been closer than it is right now,” Trump said on Tuesday in a video in his Truth Social media website.
“We need to clean house of all of the warmongers and ‘America Last’ globalists, and the deep state, the Pentagon, the State Department and the national-security industrial complex,” he added, claiming to have been the only president to reject the advice of generals, bureaucrats, and diplomats who “only know how to get [the US] into conflict” but not out of it.
“These people have been seeking confrontation for a long time,” Trump said. “Now we’re teetering on the brink of World War III and a lot of people don’t see it.”
The former president claimed the conflict in Ukraine, which turns 1 year old on Friday, could be ended in 24 hours with the right leadership.
While it’s true that Trump rejected the advice of figures pushing for war, most notably his national security adviser, John Bolton, Trump also flouted their more cautious advice on multiple occasions, and brought the world to the brink of nuclear war with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in 2017.
In August 2017, amid a tense showdown between the DPRK and US ally South Korea, Trump threatened the nuclear-armed socialist state with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if it continued to make threats against the US.
Weeks later, Pyongyang tested its first thermonuclear weapon, and Trump soon proposed creating the W76-2 “micro-nuke,” which analysts warned was extremely dangerous because it lowered the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.
The situation was defused months later by the DPRK, not Trump, when leader Kim Jong-un announced a unilateral moratorium on nuclear weapons tests. A rapprochement began in early 2018, when the two Koreas entered the Winter Olympics under a united Korean flag at PyeongChang, South Korea, and saw multiple rounds of peace talks between Pyongyang, Seoul, and the United States, to end the war that began in 1950.
Those efforts ultimately failed as Trump refused to give concessions on economic sanctions before the DPRK had totally denuclearized, and relations deteriorated.