What will history remember of this latest unhinged period in the presidency of Donald Trump?

Will it be the disaster of this weekend’s G7 summit in France, which Trump’s bumptiousness will surely set off?

Or will it be his inane quarrel with the Danish prime minister over whether Greenland is for sale?

Or, perhaps, it will be his astonishing anti-Semitic smear that American Jews are being “disloyal” to Israel when they vote Democratic, and against him.

Actually, the winner this time will be “none of the above.” Instead, it will be something far more ominous.

Like so many bizarre moments in Trump’s reality show, most of his theatrics will be dismissed in history as mere distractions created to blind us to what really matters.

What really matters is the survival of the planet, and there have been events in recent days that indicate we now have genuine reason to worry.

In addition to the deepening climate crisis, the world appears — without much fanfare — to have stumbled into the start of a full-blown nuclear arms race that may make the Cold War of the last century a relic of a less threatening past.

That is what historians may remember from this moment in Trump’s presidency.

In both the United States and Russia, there are signs that uncontrolled global nuclear tensions have returned, and the risk of nuclear warfare in other dangerous parts of the world is at an all-time high.

Last Monday, the Pentagon confirmed that the U.S. had just tested a cruise missile that would have been banned in a 1987 nuclear arms treaty with Russia that recently collapsed after Washington withdrew from it.

Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned the U.S. test as evidence of “new threats” to Russia and promised that “we will react accordingly.”

But Putin has been having trouble himself dealing with the nuclear issue. In what some Russian media outlets are describing as “Putin’s Chernobyl,” he has been vague about a mysterious nuclear explosion inside Russia earlier this month.

Information is slowly leaking out about the failure of a top-secret missile test where at least five Russian nuclear scientists were killed, and record high radiation levels were experienced.

Similar to the American missile test, it was a dramatic sign that these two countries are now deeply involved in the development of advanced nuclear weapons.

But unlike the Cold War of the 20th century, there are now far more global nuclear dangers than simply these two historic rivals.

North Korea’s Kim Jong Un successfully duped Trump during their face-to-face summits and is gradually building up his country’s nuclear arsenal, threatening South Korea and Japan.

India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed rivals, are threatening war if the explosive issue of Kashmir is not resolved.

And the Middle East — no longer restrained by the United States — is on the brink of a potential nuclear arms race involving Saudi Arabia, Iran and Israel.

The wider context for these new nuclear threats is that worldwide military spending last year underwent a boom — particularly by Trump’s America.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the U.S. in 2018 raised its military expenditure for the first time in seven years, spending almost as much on defence as the next eight countries on the list combined.

Trump’s administration has been particularly focused on ripping up any agreement concerning nuclear arms control.

The U.S. has pulled out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and abandoned the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. This leaves only one major treaty — which expires in February 2021 — providing formal restraint on the world’s major nuclear arsenals.

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The leaders of America’s military forces reportedly support extension of this treaty, but Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, does not. Bolton sees these international agreements as constraints on American power and says that it is “highly unlikely” the U.S. will continue with it beyond 2021.

That, of course, only applies if Trump is re-elected.

With the survival of the planet at stake — as the risks of climate change and nuclear warfare increase — that makes the 2020 U.S. presidential election an even more crucial moment in history.

Tony Burman , formerly head of CBC News and Al Jazeera English, is a freelance contributing foreign affairs columnist for the Star. He is based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @TonyBurman

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