{"id":227589,"date":"2026-03-24T12:10:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-24T16:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/24\/watch-former-deputy-national-security-advisor-answers-geopolitics-questions-tech-support\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T16:55:12","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T20:55:12","slug":"watch-former-deputy-national-security-advisor-answers-geopolitics-questions-tech-support","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/24\/watch-former-deputy-national-security-advisor-answers-geopolitics-questions-tech-support\/","title":{"rendered":"Watch Former Deputy National Security Advisor Answers Geopolitics Questions | Tech Support"},"content":{"rendered":"

Watch Former Deputy National Security Advisor Answers Geopolitics Questions | Tech Support<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.wired.com\/video\/watch\/tech-support-former-deputy-national-security-advisor-answers-geopolitics-questions<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-03-24 12:10:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.wired.com<\/a><\/p>\n

I’m Ben Rhodes.<\/p>\n

For eight years, I was a deputy national security advisor<\/p>\n

for Barack Obama.<\/p>\n

I’m here to answer your questions from the internet.<\/p>\n

This is Geopolitics Support.<\/p>\n

[upbeat music]<\/p>\n

@Sean17Henley asks, So in your opinion,<\/p>\n

just how close are we to World War III?<\/p>\n

I think we are uncomfortably close to it.<\/p>\n

First of all, look at where the current wars are<\/p>\n

that are being fought.<\/p>\n

So we already have a major land war in Europe,<\/p>\n

the biggest one that we’ve had since World War II,<\/p>\n

with the Russian invasion of Ukraine<\/p>\n

that has killed probably hundreds of thousands of people<\/p>\n

and has not ended.<\/p>\n

We’ve already seen a major conflict in the Middle East<\/p>\n

with the Gaza War and Israel taking action<\/p>\n

in seven or eight countries,<\/p>\n

and we see this state of war between the United States<\/p>\n

and Iran that could lead to state collapse in Iran,<\/p>\n

could lead to major refugee flows.<\/p>\n

So we’re 2\/3 of the way there,<\/p>\n

if you look at the map of World War II.<\/p>\n

And now, the third piece of this could be the Taiwan Strait.<\/p>\n

China has made very clear<\/p>\n

that it doesn’t see Taiwan as separate from China.<\/p>\n

They want to reunify Taiwan no matter what they have to do,<\/p>\n

and the Taiwanese increasingly do not wanna be<\/p>\n

a part of China.<\/p>\n

If China were to try to militarily take control of Taiwan,<\/p>\n

then we’d really be in a situation where that entire map<\/p>\n

of World War II, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, East Asia,<\/p>\n

suddenly, you do have conflict along those fault lines.<\/p>\n

I think the bigger reason<\/p>\n

that I’m worried about this is look at the collection<\/p>\n

of people who are in charge of the most powerful countries<\/p>\n

in the world today, Donald Trump in the United States,<\/p>\n

Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China,<\/p>\n

you can throw in Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel,<\/p>\n

Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey.<\/p>\n

These are older men, they are nationalists,<\/p>\n

they are strongmen.<\/p>\n

These are the kind of leaders that can get into conflict.<\/p>\n

Now, you might say, it seems<\/p>\n

like Trump wants to avoid the war,<\/p>\n

doesn’t seem like the Chinese are looking for a world war,<\/p>\n

but that’s always the case.<\/p>\n

The problem is when you…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Watch Former Deputy National Security Advisor Answers Geopolitics Questions | Tech Support https:\/\/www.wired.com\/video\/watch\/tech-support-former-deputy-national-security-advisor-answers-geopolitics-questions Publish Date:…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":227590,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/dwgyu36up6iuz.cloudfront.net\/heru80fdn\/image\/upload\/c_fill,d_placeholder_wired.png,fl_progressive,g_face,h_1080,q_80,w_1920\/v1774355592\/wired_tech-support-former-deputy-national-security-advisor-answers-geopolitics-questions.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-227589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227589"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227589"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":227591,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227589\/revisions\/227591"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}