Qian Liu is an economist, not a geopolitical analyst. Her commentary is a veiled attack on Trump’s trade war with China, highlighting the economic woes in the West, which she says could trigger a “World War III” if left unadressed. She compares the 2008 financial crisis to a disease that had only been given a palliative treatment – quantitative easing and near-zero (or even negative) interest rates – without being properly cured.

The author says “treating a sick economy requires structural reforms.” The world tends to overlook the deeper causes of the 2008 crisis that appear as entrenched as ever. A decade after the global financial meltdown, the underlying problems have not been fixed. Financial regulators’ first response to the debt-fuelled crisis was to pursue a “paradox of policy” – they slashed interest rates to encourage spending and to prevent recession turning to depression. The medicine was supposed to be only for short-term emergency use.

Since then banks had been transformed from the under-capitalised, over-leveraged and inadequately supervised system of 2007. It is safer and more transparent today, but cheap credit, low interest rates and mountains of debt remain the same. In fact China is grappling with similar challenges – how to handle its debt-ridden economy.

The author fears that “a prolonged economic crisis, combined with rising income inequality, could well escalate into a major global military conflict.” She illustrates how World War II started as a result of economic nationalism – a chilling reminder of Trump’s protectionist policies. President Herbert Hoover’s 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act to protect American workers and farmers from foreign competition led to the Great Depression, economic conditions that helped cause World War II.

Sharing the views of many scholars and economists, the author is right about how “high levels of inequality can play a significant role in stoking conflict.” Momentarily we are witnessing “wealth and income inequality at historically high levels.” But populists, whose rise has the “current social, political, and technological landscape” to thank for, seek to convince working-class voters that job insecurity, competition from trade and immigration, loss of culture are more treacherous than inequality. Trump’s poor supporters turn a blind eye to wealth gap, as long as they feel good about being white.

In Europe the influx of refugees and resentment against globalisation had whipped up nationalism and stoked popular dissent, plunging countries like Germany and Italy into political disarray, in which “sustaining governments now seems to take more time than actual governing.” This has deprived leaders of time and resources to pursue meaningful reforms. “All are symptoms of failed policies that could turn out to be trigger points for a future crisis.”

The author says “voters have good reason to be frustrated, but the emotionally appealing populists to whom they are increasingly giving their support are offering ill-advised solutions that will only make matters worse.” Indeed, looking at the chaos in the US and the paralysis in Europe, Chinese leaders tout that their model of governance is better than liberal democracy. Unsurprisingly most Chinese are satisfied with authoritarian rule, as long as the economy remains robust.

The leadership in Beijing benefits from multilaterialism and the world’s “unprecedented interconnectedness,” and it critises Trump’s pursuit of “unilateral, isolationist policies,” while doing little to end the proxy wars in Syria and Yemen.

The international community has been speculating about a “World War III” since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Its very name has implied its own inevitability, especially when now and then tensions rise in certain parts of the world, that could ignite an armed conflict. The Syrian war shows that a local conflict can morph into a global one, as the US and Russia are directly involved there. We have talked about a third World War not only as something that might happen, but something that will. The danger is that World War III would be more devastating, due to the potential use of nuclear weapons – no something we all wish for.