The Tribune

THERE are storm clouds, and then there are storm clouds.

We’re heading into the heart of the 2026 hurricane season, and there are whispers that some rough weather might be heading our way sometime in the next fortnight. Maybe so. Maybe not. But if the worst happens, most of us will do our best to make our way through it. That’s what you have to do with literal storm clouds.

But how about the figurative kind of storm clouds? Those that serve as a metaphor for big trouble that’s not created by meteorological conditions, but, rather, by arrogance and impulsivity.

By humans, in other words.

We’re in a world this morning at least partly defined by two wars of choice, both conducted by arrogant, impulsive men who tragically misjudged their own military capacity and the determination and ability of their chosen opponent.

In Ukraine, Vladimir Putin and Russia’s ill-conceived and poorly executed war plans have mired his hollow nation’s military in an increasingly desperate struggle to achieve something that might look to Russians as a victory before the internal weaknesses in the Russian society and economy doom his excessively optimistic adventure to annex a large neighbor.

As the determined Ukrainians fight on after fully four-and-a-half years of their existential struggle to maintain a relatively recently achieved degree of political independence and the beginnings of a democratic domestical structure, Putin must surely regret his mistakes and misjudgments.

But the suffering of this foolish war has spread far wider than the grim battlefields of northeastern Ukraine, where the landscape must somewhat resemble the desolate, ravaged fields and devastated country hamlets of World War I France.

Ukraine was a prize for Hitler’s Nazi Germany in 1941 and its bountiful fields and agricultural potential were--until the current war--a major food source for many parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Now it’s fair to assume that millions of people in many countries are starving or at least severely undernourished because of this war’s interruptions of food shipments from Ukraine’s major Black Sea ports.

Donald Trump’s war of choice against Iran is not the same as Putin’s war of choice against Ukraine. The Russian is seeking to ignite a process leading to restoration of at least some of the respect and prestige accorded to the former USSR when it shared the world’s highest political stage with the United States for 45 years during the last century.

Ukraine is hardly an innocent on the world stage, though Putin’s aggressive bellicosity makes them shine by comparison to Russia. Kyiv has its own history of inhumane conduct.

Trump’s chosen foe, Iran, is of course a significantly more malign force in the world’s most politically volatile region. Iran is ruled with a strong autocratic hand since 1979 by a cabal of religious zealots whose obsession with maintaining their grip on what might, in more normal circumstances, be a valued and respected player in world society. It has led them to crush domestic dissent while funding and fomenting terrorism across the globe, but mostly in their own Mideastern back yard.

It’s easy to pillory the American president for his arrogance in presuming an easy victory over Tehran and his impulsivity in starting a war without either competent planning or much evidence of strategic vision. He’s guilty of both of these sins. But Trump’s idea that regime change is sorely needed in Iran is certainly valid. It’s just a shame that six full months of this war haven’t seemed to nudge the Iranian powerhouse in the direction of regime change.

Sadly, we seem only able to guess at what China or even India may do next in response to the serious interruptions to global food and fuel supplies that these two wars have caused. Food and fuel are, and have long certainly been, two storm clouds on the world’s horizon. It’s a shame that two foolish but powerful leaders have so exacerbated matters that those storm clouds seem much darker today than even a couple of years ago.

One of Canada’s most distinguished academic figures, the widely admired historian Margaret MacMillan, has written this week in the New York Times a profound and provocative essay on the general theme. Despite the world seemingly going to hell while we seem unprepared to arrest its decline, she writes, there remains hope, sometimes in unexpected places.

MacMillan has held senior academic positions at the University of Toronto and Oxford University. She is one of a small group of English-language writers who can distill cogent themes and broad yet valid generalizations from the mass of memoirs and other records that can illuminate and inform recent world political history. MacMillan is always a must read. Here’s some of what she had to say this week:

“Today, there are signs of impending doom everywhere. New temperature records have been set and reset this summer, the earth has baked in droughts, and wildfires have raged. Debt across advanced economies is approaching unprecedented levels. Cuts in medical and food aid, most significantly by the United States, have caused unnecessary deaths and helped the spread of diseases, one of which, sooner or later, could become another pandemic. Artificial intelligence continues its rapid, unregulated rise, threatening jobs, security and, in darker projections, human existence.

“Revisionist powers flout rules and norms with impunity. Electorates are angry and volatile. Slow, deliberate, necessarily discreet diplomacy, which builds trust and understanding, has given way to a performative, brash style more suited for TikTok-addled attention spans or the playground.

“But the end of the old system does not have to mean the end of cooperation. We still have many of the components of an effective world order. We have a rich web of international institutions, many of them largely invisible, which manage the links among nations, from civil aviation to the internet. Treaties are still largely observed. International law and sovereignty can be hard to enforce and defend, but many of us still deplore the breaches. The very existence of an international public opinion can still put pressure on our leaders. Many of the organizations of the fading structures, among them the United Nations, the World Trade Organization and the World Bank, are increasingly drained of resources and meaning, but they still exist.”

Her diagnosis is not isolated. Many observers of the current American and world political situation would subscribe to her sharp warning about current trends. And while she doesn’t directly refer to the upcoming US mid-term elections in her opinion piece, MacMillan must surely share the hope that these elections will restore political balance in Washington and that what seem to be ever more likely Democratic congressional majorities will finally apply the brakes to Trump’s dangerous international instincts and restore the US to an honorable position of strength and respect in the world.

We can only hope that level-headed strategists in the Republican Party as well as the Democrats will be able to move the US away from its current jingoistic, xenophobic, and isolationist stance and back toward the position of relatively benign strength that had buttressed the world for nearly four generations after the Second World War.

MacMillan recalls the genesis of that relatively calm era: “By 1945, Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States and their allies had fought two brutal world wars in the space of three decades. When they created the architecture of the new existing order, they were very clear on what they wanted to prevent. Many previous frameworks had failed, but they would create something new that would succeed.”

In the US after Donald Trump leaves office, and even beginning in January, if the Democrats do well in the November elections, the to-do list will be long and seemingly overwhelming. It will certainly include as much movement as will be politically possible toward restoration of a vital North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as well as rebuilding socially, commercially, and politically much warmer relations with America’s two great neighbors Canada and Mexico.

Vital Asian allies Japan and Korea will need strong reassurance that the US remains capable and willing to be their partner in many areas. Chaotic, whimsical and poorly conceived international economic policy must be reformed.

How much of all of this might be possible in the last two years of the Trump administration, even assuming Democratic congressional majorities?

We will see.