13 SECONDS TO MIDNIGHT ON THE DOOMSDAY CLOCK (The Daily Whatever Press)—On Saturday, the Financial Times rolled over, slapped the clock radio, and asked the entire English-speaking world a question: “Are We Sleepwalking into World War III?”
Hahahaha. Are you kidding me?
Gideon Rachman, the paper’s chief foreign affairs commentator and the author of an entire book called War Is Interested in You, opened with one week of news: a Houthi missile that killed 12 people at Riyadh’s main airport, more than 100 Ukrainian civilians killed by Russian strikes in seven days, Polish warnings of Russian attacks inside the European Union, and Chinese live-fire drills strung along China’s coast. Then he ruled that none of it counts yet, because a world war needs great powers fighting each other directly, across continents.
Gideon. Sweetie. The war is interested in you. It has been interested in you for YEARS. It keeps leaving you voicemails, and you keep letting them go to the machine.
I said this on February 6, 2025, in the very first thing I ever posted on this here Substack, a piece called “We’re Already at War.” Volodymyr Zelenskyy had just warned that cutting off Ukraine meant “dragging the United States and all of Europe into World War III,” and I looked around and saw two, two, two wars in one, like a goddamned roll of Certs: a world war out there and a cold civil war in here. As Madge the manicurist would tell you with your fingers in the dish, you’re soaking in it.
Twenty months later, I’d love to report that I was wrong. Nope. I was early, which in this business pays exactly the same as wrong. I just laid out the whole case, Manchuria to Riyadh, in a longer piece over on The Hinge & The Near Field.
And I wasn’t even first. Olga Lautman, who has tracked the Kremlin since before Crimea, wrote on November 26, 2024, that “Russia is undeniably at war with the West.” Pretty unambiguous, wouldn’t you say? In September she went on Amped Up for an episode billed as “The World War Has Started.” Julie Roginsky has put it in a headline on her Substack, Salty Politics, three separate times this year: in January, in August, and in September, that last one titled “World War III Has Begun. Nobody Has the Guts to Say So.” When I met these two women, they had every fucking proof point I’d been missing.
The Sleepwalking Caucus wants its war to show up the way wars do in the movies, with a declaration, a radio address, and a date which will live in infamy. Sorry, kids. Sequels never live up to the original, and this one is shaping up to be Jaws 3-D: dumber, sloppier, and coming straight at your face. What we got was a Starlink ground station set on fire outside Warsaw, which Poland says Russian intelligence was behind. We got Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, saying, “We are not at war, but we are no longer at peace either.” We got North Korean soldiers fighting in Europe and Iranian-designed drones, built in Russia, knocking out Ukraine’s lights most nights.
Ahhhhh, here we go…
On October 8, Donald Trump promised that the United States “will not be attacking Iran at any time prior to the Midterm Elections.” On Monday, 11 days later, on his way out of the White House, he told reporters, “We’re hitting Iran very hard, as you know, economically as well as militarily.” In the same gaggle he said, “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine. They haven’t been doing much.”
That same day, a Russian drone hit a park in Kharkiv Oblast and killed six people. Two of them were children.
FINE. Two dead kids in a park is Donald Trump’s idea of FINE. The one man whose word is supposed to make Vladimir Putin think twice waived Russian sanctions last week, called the slaughter fine, and bragged about hitting Iran “militarily.” Go fuck yourself, sir.
Even the WOPR, the movie computer that a teenage Matthew Broderick nearly used to start World War III from his bedroom, worked out that the only winning move is not to play. Our president is losing to a prop from WarGames.
So, Gideon, to answer your question: nobody’s sleepwalking. We’re wide awake inside World War III, and the man who could make it a whole lot worse just called dead children in Kharkiv “fine.”
The midterms are in two weeks. Vote like the war already started, because it did, and Donald Trump is on the wrong side of it. is on the wrong side of it.
Thanks for stopping by!
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