World War Tweet: How the Third World War could have started with 280 Characters

It is truly a strange time we live in, where the president of one of the most powerful states on the planet could lead one of the most devastating wars the world has ever seen, with a playground insult.

I am of course talking about President Trump, and his chronic digital verbal diarrhea on Twitter. Twitter itself has become a fantastic platform for political shenanigans and no politician has taken to it quite like President Trump. The world marveled at his entertaining and politically charged tweets but then very quickly held its breath when he called Kim Jong Un "rocket man". What followed were politicians madly trying to curb their leaders from having a cat fight that could obliterate life on earth. With Trump's stubbornness and questionable political intuition and Kim Jong Un's pride and desire to prove himself, people often underestimated how close we were to World War III.

But why write about it now, you ask? After over one and a half years and several peace summits, surely this is old news? How is Internet Explorer working for you? You are one hundred percent correct; this is old news, this has been talked about to death and Internet Explorer is still loading my articles. I violated the grave of this tweet because I am a traditionalist, if a war is going to start I don't want it to be because of some silly little digital communique, I want it to be done the old fashioned way: with lots of guns and explosions.

Luckily, it seems the leaders of the world are more than happy to do that too. Earlier today, one of Iran's most powerful military leaders General Qasem Soleimani was assassinated by the United States. I say "assassinated" but that term is a tad misleading; if you are assassinated, it carries the connotation that you were killed discretely. What the U.S really did was order, from President Trump personally, an airstrike at an airport in Baghdad. Not your traditional assassination, but hey if it works it works. Tradition strikes again! Unfortunately, the Twitter President got involved again and the first response from a government official about this airstrike, was President Trump tweeting a jpg of the American flag.

Beautiful.

Iran publicly swore vengeance against the United States - which you can read about here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-middle-east-50980663#sa-link_location=story-body&intlink_from_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fworld-middle-east-50979463&intlink_ts=1578072491495-sa - but Twitter Trump does not seem to be worried. He doesn't seem to care that the world is raging at his hasty and ill-advised decision; or that the U.K is up in arms because PM Boris Johnson was not informed about the strike before it happened; or that the world was advising caution and restraint before the strike was ordered. Not that President. He's riding a mechanical bull of chaos and he refuses to back down.

Alright Shay, you say. You've made your jokes and your stabs at President Trump, but the Middle East has been in turmoil for decades. How does another conflict equal a third World War? Well, on its own it doesn't. Yes, there are other countries who are upset and up in arms but they aren't hostile. But the real danger is Supreme Leader Sno- I mean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un.

Kim Jong Un abandoned his New Years speech and instead decided to threaten the world. In his speech he had this to say: he said that because the U.S refused to lessen the sanctions placed on North Korea and their continuing joint drills with South Korea, the country, "has found no grounds to be unilaterally bound any longer by the commitment with no other party to honor, and this has put a damper on its efforts for disarmament and the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons across the world." The actions that Kim Jong Un has taken is, to be very honest and quite frank, alarming. He has now completely abandoned the nuclear non-proliferation deal and plans to continue to test its long range missiles and nuclear capabilities. They have even decided to continue launching missiles into Japanese airspace ( https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/01/02/asia-pacific/politics-diplomacy-asia-pacific/north-korean-missiles-flying-japan-matter-time-experts-say/#.Xg987vyxW00 ) and I can assure you that the Japanese government will not take that lying down.

But perhaps the most alarming development is this: Kim Jong Un stated that the world will see a new kind of strategic weapon, and knowing Un and his track record it is definitely nuclear. The world has acted with understandable alarm, and you know its bad when even China says that that's a bit much. China, Russia and the United Kingdom have pleaded caution and restraint when dealing with the dangerous individual and his country. But once again, the US does not seem overly concerned.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has told Fox News the Trump Administration hopes that "Chairman Kim chooses a different course" and that he will "make the right decision and that and he'll choose peace and prosperity over conflict and war." The President himself remains unconcerned and believes Kim to be a man of his word. Yeah, well, Trump shared similar optimism last year at the first peace summit with North Korea and again when he believed that cutting off Iran's oil supplies would temper them. Guess where that led him?

And there you have it. A veritable world war on the rise and it wasn't even because of a Tweet, just like the good old days. Now Trump and Kim will have to resolve their potentially life threatening issues the old fashioned way, with even more peace talks and overseas summits.

Let's just hope President Trump doesn't catch Supreme Leader Kim at the airport.