On March 13th, buried in the New York Times’s coverage of the U.S.-Israel-Iran conflict was a headline that would have been easy to miss amid the din of war coverage: “As El Niño Simmers, Scientists Warn of Weather Extremes Starting in Late Summer.” Many readers may not even have noticed it, but that article noted that scientists at the Climate Prediction Center, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had raised their estimate for an El Niño event this summer from 60% to about 80%.
Admittedly, in this strange world of ours, that hardly seemed like an earth-shattering revelation. But if you had read the piece more closely, your alarm bells should instantly have gone off. Forecasters now predict that the coming El Niño — a warming of the Pacific Ocean that deeply affects global weather patterns — is likely to be as severe as the one in 2023-2024, which triggered severe flooding and prolonged heatwaves around the world. As the article noted, however, average world temperatures are now actually higher than they were at the height of that previous El Niño, thanks to global warming, and so it’s likely that we will face even more intense heatwaves and flooding this time around.
Consider that news alarming enough. Unfortunately, the bad news didn’t end there. The Times article went on to report that, since early last year, the Trump administration has laid off thousands of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) workers, greatly diminishing the agency’s ability to respond to such impending weather disasters. And then there’s the dismal fact that Trump has overseen the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which once sent humanitarian aid to disaster-struck countries.
And, sadly enough, it only gets worse from there. After all, we know that the Trump administration is doing everything it can to boost the production of fossil fuels — the consumption of which is the main driver of global warming — even as it also works to impede global action to slow the warming process. On January 7th, for example, the president announced that the United States would withdraw from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the bedrock treaty upon which most international efforts to rein in that onrushing nightmare are based.
Likewise, on February 12th, the administration repealed the scientific determination (called the “endangerment finding”) that gives the government the legal authority to combat climate change. And that’s not all: on March 15th, the Times also reported that the administration was preparing to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the nation’s premier institution for studying global weather patterns — including the severe climate disturbances we can expect from the coming El Niño and higher world temperatures. In other words, the rest of us will not only be deprived of emergency assistance during future climate disasters, but also lack timely information about oncoming hazardous weather patterns.
As I consumed all of that — in the midst, of course, of President Trump’s ill-conceived war on Iran — it struck me that we need to brace ourselves for ever more calamitous outcomes from Donald Trump’s extreme leadership incompetence. In fact, his incompetence is likely to produce one mega-disaster after another, culminating perhaps in global political-economic collapse.
Trump’s profound incompetence
Donald Trump’s leadership incompetence has already been demonstrated in one bad move after another. His capricious imposition of ever-fluctuating tariffs on U.S. imports, for example, has caused prolonged misery for farmers and many small and medium businesses that depend on predictable trade patterns. Likewise, his heavy-handed deployment of armed ICE and other federal agents to Minneapolis achieved little in the way of apprehending dangerous immigrants but caused widespread disorder and violence, while killing two nonviolent protestors. But the most severe example of his governing incompetence to date has been his handling of Operation Epic Fury, the war with Iran.
While devising an elaborate plan to destroy Iran’s conventional military capabilities and shatter the regime, the Trump team appears to have made no preparations to eliminate the Iranians’ extensive drone capabilities or their ability to disrupt oil production and transit in the Persian Gulf area, with far-reaching global consequences. As of this reporting, the critical Strait of Hormuz through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes every day (along with a substantial share of its liquified natural gas [LNG] and chemical fertilizers) remains largely closed to commercial traffic. This has produced energy shortages in many countries that are heavily reliant on imported oil and/or LNG and, because oil is a globally-traded commodity, it has boosted gasoline prices in the United States, despite the fact that this country doesn’t import much Middle Eastern oil.
None of this should have been unexpected. The Iranians have, on numerous occasions, threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz in response to a U.S. attack on their country, while their efforts to build up a vast stockpile of drones and missiles (and to hide them in remote underground sites) were well publicized.
Any intelligent war planner — of which there are many in the U.S. military establishment — would have known of these realities and planned for them. Indeed, U.S. planning to secure the Strait goes back to 1980, when President Jimmy Carter’s White House issued what became known as the “Carter Doctrine” — an assertion that any move by a hostile force to impede the oil flow in the Persian Gulf “will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” To enforce that edict, the Pentagon established the U.S. Central Command (Centcom) and established a network of military bases throughout the Gulf region. Since its inception, Centcom has repeatedly stressed its ability to keep the Strait open in the face of any Iranian drive to block it.
Trump obviously ignored all such intelligence — collected over many years by top American officials — and started his war without the slightest apparent plan for keeping the Strait safe for energy shipping. Not only were U.S. naval forces unprepared to escort oil tankers through it, but Trump failed to enlist U.S. allies in such efforts — a glaring fault that only became obvious after the war began when he suddenly called upon them to do so (and chided them when they proved reluctant).
And consider all of this sheer, unadulterated incompetence, on a massive scale.
The blows to come
We have yet to witness all the consequences of Trump’s incompetence in undertaking the war against Iran. The shutdown of fertilizer exports from the Gulf is already causing the price of that critical commodity to rise around the world. In doing so, it threatens agricultural production as farmers balk at the higher costs — a trend likely to result in higher food costs everywhere, including the United States. That will, of course, result in increased hunger for those least able to afford the higher prices of food and rising inflation. The rise in food and energy prices could also diminish consumer spending and investor confidence, possibly leading to a global economic slowdown (or worse).
And don’t imagine that those are the only major shocks to the global system we can expect in the months ahead — shocks the Trump team is unlikely to address with competent leadership. At the January convocation of business and political elites in Davos, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum released its “Global Risks Report 2026,” identifying what experts believe are the greatest future threats to global stability and prosperity. According to those experts, the top risks include extreme weather events, state-based armed conflict, and a global economic downturn — real-time threats that Trump has already encountered and failed to address successfully. As those perils gain momentum in the months ahead, Trump’s incompetence will result in ever greater hardship and suffering.
The adverse effects of AI
That Davos Risk Report also identified another category of threats for which the Trump administration is woefully unprepared: “adverse outcomes of AI technologies.”
Beginning with AI’s impending impact on employment, the report cites one study suggesting that “AI could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level, white-collar jobs within the next five years in the United States, potentially driving unemployment to 10–20%” — an enormous threat to social and political cohesion. At the same time, a massive buildup of computing data centers is putting extreme stress on local energy and water supplies across the U.S., introducing an added layer of popular unease and conflict.
Hovering in the background of all this is the threat of “rogue AI” — the possibility that computer scientists at OpenAI, Anthropic, or one of the other leading AI firms will create a “superintelligent” version of AI capable of outperforming humans in most cognitive tasks and selecting its own objectives, independent of human wishes or instructions. Think of “Skynet,” the superintelligent AI in the Terminator movie series that chooses to eliminate humans by inciting a global nuclear war. While the Davos Risk Report doesn’t address the risk of advanced AI development directly, there is growing talk in the scientific community of just such an outcome, as vividly suggested, for example, by the 2025 book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.
And I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that President Trump and his entourage are wholly unprepared to address the very idea of such a possibility. Rather than emphasize safety in the development of advanced AI models, Trump has called for their untrammeled evolution. In his major policy statement on AI, “Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” he made his top objective overridingly clear: “It is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.”
That means, as his plan explains, eliminating all barriers to the development of advanced AI models, including any legislative restrictions on their release and any local environmental impediments to the construction of mammoth AI-driven data centers nationwide. Nowhere does Trump’s plan acknowledge the potential for catastrophic job losses from widespread AI utilization or the risk of AI going rogue and threatening the survival of humanity. Rather than offering Americans the slightest protection from such potential calamities, he is ensuring that they will become more likely and that the rest of us will suffer the consequences.
Convergent catastrophes
Until recently, the shocks to global stability and safety — war, economic disorder, climate disaster, and AI-driven calamities — seemed relatively distinct. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, however, has offered us a first glimpse, however limited, of how they might become a conjoined mega-catastrophe.
In the future, there is no reason to assume that such earth-shaking calamities will remain discrete events, allowing world leaders adequate time to respond to them individually. It is likely, in fact, that they will arise ever more frequently in unison. In a 2013 study conducted for the U.S. intelligence community, the National Research Council described just such “clusters of extreme events,” warning that they are a concern from a national security perspective “because U.S. government resources and those of other international actors deployed to deal with a security or humanitarian concern related to the first event in a cluster might be unavailable or less available to deal with a second or subsequent event.” The potential result of such a future reality could, of course, prove to be almost unimaginable social disorder, economic chaos, and even state collapse.
Overcoming one extreme event, let alone two or more, would always pose a remarkable challenge to even the most competent of governments. Sadly, we face an increasingly hazardous future with a demonstrably incompetent leadership team running what still passes for the most powerful country on Earth. For the United States to survive, no less prosper, Americans will need to unite around a demand for a humane and deeply competent national leadership team. If there’s anything we can agree on, it should be a need for leaders who can successfully steer us through severe national calamities — but don’t hold your breath for such an outcome in the next three years.
COMMENTS