Prior to World War II, the world's major economies were in a decade-long depression, the worst cases being the once mighty industrial giants Germany and the United States. Despite numerous debt-building initiatives to kickstart these economies, nothing could get them moving. Except, eventually, war.
As Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman reiterated on This Week, scholars nearly unanimously agree that the very thing that ressurected these moribund economies was World War II. Forty-eight million combatants and innocents died, but the Allied economies skyrocketed over their burnt and grisly corpses, so much so that the Allies could afford to rebuild the Axis economies to match their own.
So it naturally begs the question: If Obama and his brain trust, like Roosevelt before him, cannot jumpstart the economy (in Obama's view in the worst crisis since the Depression), and especially if a bankrupt automobile industry throws 3,000,000 workers into the soup kitchens, will Obama consciously or--even more frighteningly--unconsciously opt for World War III? And what of the leaders of other plummeting economies, like China, Japan, Russia and the European Union? What will they do?
It is common understanding that World War III would push the world into a hell of mass slaughter the likes of which could bring the earth to the brink of extinction. So the question becomes: What other means are available? Or is a fully mobilized war economy the only, Faustian choice?
If no other thing, this will either be Obama's greatest achievement--to revive a horribly ruined economy without war--or his ignoble, tragic descent into infamy.