I routinely read polls after dousing them in a full heaping of salt, but a recent Associated Press survey gave me disturbing pause: 60 percent of Americans expect to endure World War III in their lifetimes.

Indeed, such a lopsided answer to such a frightening question is worth more than a pause. It should be the main issue in the nation’s coming elections — not only in next year’s midterm battle for control of Congress, but also in the 2008 race for the White House.

The questions voters would use to frame their choices are simple: Which candidates or parties have the best plan to avoid the sort of global catastrophe that three out of five Americans expect they’ll witness? In electing the 110th Congress and the 44th president, is it preferable to seek continuity with the Big Planners of the Bush war team, or would it be better to make an entirely new set of plans for avoiding World War III?

Sadly, there is little guidance for answering such questions now, for they are not even on the table as politicians bicker back and forth about homeland security, troop levels in Iraq and what to do about North Korea.

The AP poll (1,000 Americans were interviewed between July 5-10, and the results have a 3 percentage point margin of sampling error) brought to mind a startling dinner I had several years ago with some very powerful men who spent hours discussing, with alarming certainty, the likelihood of war with China in our lifetimes.

Long before the Sept. 11 attacks intensified the nation’s necessary obsession with Islamic terrorists, I had been invited by the publisher of an influential magazine to dinner at his Washington mansion with a former director of the CIA, a top executive of one of the nation’s largest defense contractors, and a former congressman-turned-lobbyist. I sat slack-jawed as these authoritative sources matter-of-factly analyzed U.S. strategies for defeating China. Most remarkable was their unanimous view that such a war is inevitable — that the only debatable question was how to win it.

I don’t recall much about the military scenarios, including the horrific estimates of U.S. casualties, because in return for the invitation I agreed never to report such details. So my main memory is of leaving with the unsettingly distinct impression that the Big Planners of Washington were seriously gunning for a war that could provoke a worldwide calamity. Many more dinners like this, I thought, and I might have to join a self-sufficiency cult in Idaho.

The last time that evening came to mind with such urgency was when I was listening to an interview that ABC’s Charlie Gibson had with George W. Bush in April 2001. In it, the new president defended his backing of the largest U.S. arms sale to Taiwan in history by seemingly issuing the most specific military threat to China of any recent president. He vowed to respond “with the full force of American military” if China ever attacked Taiwan, saying he would do “whatever it took to help Taiwan defend herself.”

There was much hullabaloo at the time about this apparently new — and more strident — policy toward China, accompanied by the usual White House guidance, on background, that the president didn’t really mean to change what had been the longstanding and intentional vagueness of our commitment to defend Taiwan. But there was no mistaking that this new administration was not shy about saber-rattling with China, especially in the wake of the collision of a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese jet earlier that month. Five months later, terrorists struck on U.S. soil, and China was all but forgotten, as war in Afghanistan and Iraq consumed the world’s attention.

Now there is reason to wonder if Bush’s Big Planners are ready to return to the saber-rattling of their pre-Sept. 11 stance against China. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld recently touted a new Pentagon assessment of China’s military power, noting that its defense spending is much higher than Chinese officials have reported publicly and that China is expanding its missile forces “allowing it to reach targets in many areas of the world.”

The Air Force’s top military officer, Gen. Michael Moseley, said at his Senate confirmation hearing in June that lining up American firepower for a possible war with China is “at the top of my list.”

But it was a Chinese military leader, the hawkish Major General Zhu Chenghu, who really stoked the embers recently when he seemed to answer Bush’s 2001 threat by saying China would “respond with nuclear weapons” in a conflict over Taiwan. “If the Americans are determined to interfere, then we will be determined to respond,” he said. “The Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds of cities will be destroyed by the Chinese.”

Such incendiary talk justifies the public’s fear of a world war. It is hard to imagine anything more crucial for public debate in the elections ahead.

Contributing Editor Craig Crawford is a news analyst for MSNBC, CNBC and “The Early Show” on CBS. He can be reached at ccrawford@cq.com.