The script goes like this. A right-wing party is created or taken over by a charismatic populist. Tick. He mesmerises half the country with a constant shower of nationalist and racist lies (more than half the country, in Hitler’s case). Tick.
Both Hitler and Trump took advantage of relatively new communication technologies to spread their message — radio and mass-circulation newspapers in Hitler’s case, Fox and X in Trump’s — and they both made lavish use of the so-called "Big Lie".
As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, "The great masses of the people ... will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one".
Trump has not started any wars yet. He never would start one deliberately, but then Hitler did not mean to start a big one either.
He just wanted to conquer his half of Poland after he made a deal with the Soviet Union, which got the other half. (He would be back for more later, of course.)
Demanding territory that is not theirs is a tendency common to both men: Austria, Sudetenland, and the Polish Corridor in Hitler’s case, Canada, Greenland, Panama and the Gaza Strip in Trump’s. However, Trump’s threats are unconvincing. He talks the talk, but he probably does not have the stomach for a real fight.
Hitler fought for four years in the trenches of World War 1, was decorated for his courage, and was a street-fighter in the violent politics of 1920s Germany.
Trump was born into money (he was a millionaire at the age of 8), went into the real-estate business with his father, and avoided service in the Vietnam War by claiming he had bone spurs on his heels.
This is a showman, not a brave man. There is a small risk his rash and conflicting promises might trap him into a war, especially since Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheming to draw him into a joint attack on Iran.
But even the Republican majorities in Congress would probably baulk at another American military adventure seeking "regime change" in the Middle East.
So no, Trump is probably not going to start a war. Hitler was the tragedy; Trump is the farce. But even farces can do great damage. In this case, the principal victim of his antics will be the international rule of law, a fragile and relatively recent invention that has probably spared us from a nuclear war for the past 80 years.
World War 1 killed 11million people. World War 2, only 20 years later, killed between 45m and 65m.
There were even a couple of small nuclear weapons dropped on Japan at the end.
That is what happens when you combine traditional great-power behaviour with modern weapons of mass destruction.
Yet here we are 80 years later, and no great power has fought any other great power directly since World War 2. (Proxies are OK.)
There are now four times as many people on the planet and almost four times as many countries, but the global death toll in international wars across borders (civil wars do not count) has plummeted from 1m a month in 1945 to about 100,000 a year by 2020.
However, now the numbers are going up again, mainly thanks to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. They are evidence the system that has protected us for so long is breaking down.
What the international rule of law means is sovereignty is sacred; that attacking another country is literally a crime.
Borders may only be changed by peaceful negotiation; any changes accomplished by force are illegal.
There is no international police force, so nobody may come to arrest the criminal, but the conquest will never be recognised by other countries.
There will be sanctions, boycotts, all manner of nuisances — enough, in most cases, to deter countries from trying to grab some of a neighbour’s territory.
It is a flimsy system, but it has served us well for a long time.
Lose it and we are straight back to the 18th century — with nuclear weapons.
And taking the lead in demolishing this system are two great powers, the United States and Russia, who probably owe it their own survival through 80 years of relative but precarious peace.
- Gwynne Dyer is an independent London journalist.
