world war 3

War With Iran Is Still Less Likely Than You Think

The killing of Suleimani was different

The U.S. Killing of Suleimani, an attack on a high-ranking government official, is different from previous moments of international tension during the Trump administration. Suleimani was the most important military officer in a sovereign state, rather than the leader of a stateless terrorist organization, like Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In last summer’s oil tanker and drone-downing episodes, the stakes were lower, and there were elements of deniability or ambiguity that were not feasible in the case of killing Suleimani.

The direct strike on Iran’s top military leader has led many to conclude that Iran will strike back, possibly against U.S. Targets in the Middle East. Such retaliation would be potentially costly, even if it does not lead to a general war.

But as other analysts have noted, fears of “World War III” are overblown. Even after this escalatory move, many factors that made war between the United States and Iran unlikely in June remain unchanged. There will no doubt be consequences – but general war remains unlikely.

But could the U.S. And Iran stumble into war?

Although the killing of Suleimani was a deliberate act by the United States, much fear about escalation between the United States and Iran surrounds the potential for a conflict spiral through miscalculation.

Fortunately, this type of escalation is rare. As Dan Reiter explained here at TMC during a spike in tensions with North Korea two years ago, “powder kegs” rarely explode into war by accident.

Those worried about accidental war may also point to reports that the Trump administration developed the plan to kill Suleimani in haste, suggesting there was insufficient effort to think about how Iran might respond.

But if and when it does respond, Iran’s action is likely to be highly considered. This may be worrisome – but it’s not war by accident or miscalculation. If Iran’s leaders take an action in response that triggers a general war, it will likely be because they decided it was a risk worth taking.

Retaliation by Iran is not the same as war

It’s important not to move the goalposts for how we define war. At the same time, it’s also key to distinguish tit-for-tat between the United States and Iran from a general war involving ground troops.

This is not to deny the risk of a damaging retaliatory move from Iran that may result in American casualties and lead to long-term complications for the United States in the region.

But even retaliation may not come right away. Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution argues that Iran is likely to “bide its time” despite anti-American protests in Iran during the widespread mourning for Suleimani.

Domestic politics still act as a brake — in both the United States and Iran

As TMC editor Michael Tesler wrote over the weekend, war with Iran is unpopular in the United States, and is unlikely to help Trump win reelection. And Trump has long said he doesn’t want a Middle East war.

Similarly, despite short-term domestic pressures to retaliate, Iran’s leaders want to stay in power and do not want to risk their regime in a costly war – and war between the United States and Iran would likely be very costly.

So how did we get here, and what happens next?

Back in June, we wrote that about one risk that could increase the odds of war: “if Trump’s hawkish advisers present an option that seems like it could be kept limited, but actually carries a strong likelihood of escalation.” According to news reports, Trump chose the option to kill Suleimani on short notice, surprising even some of his advisers and setting off a planning scramble.

But we also noted that Trump has backed away from tough stances before. If the past is any guide, having now looked tough, Trump may seek an off-ramp. And as Sarah Croco has pointed out here at TMC, Trump is unlikely to be punished if he flip-flops and backs down.

And even if Iran strikes back – as it says it will – it is also likely to try to avoid escalating the conflict significantly. Finding such a finely calibrated option is, of course, a difficult problem, but neither miscalculation nor domestic politics are the most likely drivers of further escalation in this case.

What might prevent the two sides from finding the off-ramps? One factor is if the administration, with Mike Pompeo at the understaffed State Department leading the hawkish charge, does not fully consider diplomatic options or engage in a robust set of invisible, backchannel consultations that would produce such options.

Another concern is that this crisis has higher stakes for Iran than last summer’s tanker or drone encounters. We know that war can occur even if both sides don’t want it when one side doesn’t believe the other’s commitment not to attack in the future. If Iran doesn’t believe the United States will really leave its regime alone, it might frame the stakes of the Suleimani killing in the strongest possible terms, planning for significant escalation.

But that seems unlikely, given that the United States is far more powerful than Iran and a general war would likely mean the end of Iran’s regime. And Iran’s leaders might alternatively believe Trump does not want a war, especially given his publicly-stated interest in reducing the U.S. Military’s footprint in the Middle East. Indeed, a challenge for Iran’s leaders is that they may agree with commentators who have noted that Trump has not made clear what he wants.

Blowback may be coming, and the U.S. Strike against Suleimani may increase the risk of bad outcomes short of all-out war. Those are reasons for concern. But it’s critical to distinguish such consequences from a general war.

World War III Is An Irresistible Meme

 

The World War III memes are here, bursting onto the shores of TikTok and Twitter after American forces assassinated the Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani this week. “Me and the boys on missile duty during #WWIII,” one reads, illustrated by a gif of two soldiers failing running from a misfired mortar. “Me chilling at home after ignoring my draft notice #WWIII,” says another, illustrated with a Spider-Man clip in which the hero’s aunt is interrupted during a prayer by the Green Goblin exploding through her window.

Along with the memes came the counter-memes, chiding people for joking about war, or smarming at them over how little their comfortable lives would be impacted by a new war in Iran.

World War III is not actually upon us, of course, but just hashtag-World War III—a container for content. In that role, these memes fulfill the internet’s ability to fashion endless turtles of content about anything. On TikTok, someone feigns illegally disposing of a draft notice set to Britney Spears’s “Criminal,” which someone else collates in a thread on Twitter, which gets rolled up into Buzzfeed metacontent about World War III memes.

@sarahfaithxx

#wwiii #ThatsWhatILike #turnitup #gymrush #BreakupWithBottled #fyp

♬ original sound - sarahfaithxx

But World War is not just a hashtag, either. It’s also a symbol. And it’s notable that young people are mustering that old emblem to express their unconscious fears about the present. In doing this, they are reviving a received notion of “world war,” one mostly expended by the generations that precede them.  

For three decades or more, World War III has been an anxious fantasy. During the Cold War, it became a shorthand for a very specific kind of doom: global nuclear destruction. After the blasts comes the fallout, the depthless smoke of nuclear winter, the ensuing end of the crops that sustain our mortal bodies, and the certain starvation of those too unlucky to have survived the war.

Those who lived through this period can still feel how real the threat was. That has not changed: Global nuclear stockpiles have been cut by 75 percent since their peak between 1965 and 1985, but there are still thousands of nuclear warheads spread all around the globe, each between tens and thousands of times more destructive than the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs detonated over Japan in 1945. Iran is not believed to have nuclear weapons, although its ambitions to develop or acquire them have been at the heart of the American conflict with the country.

Watch: World War III Is Not Imminent, Eurasia Group’s Bremmer Says [Bloomberg]

Click to expand

Want to become an FBI agent? Here’s how

It’s one of the most coveted jobs in law enforcement, but how do you become an FBI agent?

Boy reunites with his missing cat

This is 11 year-old Logan Overlin from Yelm, Washington. His cat had been missing for weeks, but was then found. His mother took the opportunity to surprise him and capture the emotional reunion between the boy and his pet on camera.

Couple find 5ft long monitor lizard in their car engine

UP NEXT

Even so, the fantasy of World War III helped hide the reality of what war had become: a tangled mess of statecraft, profiteering, and politicking. In the moment, tidy narratives often made conflicts seem straightforward, but history has unraveled their knotty strands. During the Cold War, hot tensions became hopeless moils, conducted for political benefit as much as (and, over time, more than) moral right. Vietnam braided opposition to communism, itself a tenet of Cold War conflict, with democratic state-building in a decolonizing region. Proxy wars became common, such as the United States’s support of the Afghani mujahideen to destabilize the Soviet Union rather than to support a Muslim revolution. The Gulf War braided up the emerging 24/7 media ecosystem with the oil economy. The Iraq and Afghan wars, it now seems clear, were manufactured for political and commercial gain, and at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.

And those are just some of the “normal” wars—the military ones entwined with nation-states rather than cartels like Los Zetas in Mexico, militias like the Sudanese Janjawid, and paramilitary groups like ISIS. Then there are the corporations. Mercenary data brokerage by Cambridge Analytica put useful information extracted from Facebook into service for misinformation campaigns. Via social media, organizations like the Russian Internet Research Association weaponized information, on the cheap, to disrupt the operation of the nation-states that might yet wage conventional or nuclear war. Services like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram provide easy, global reach for all the non-state actors that have proliferated to further destabilize their opponents.

In the face of all this chaos, is it any wonder that young people might see the relatively conventional act of assassinating an Iranian military commander as an oasis of political clarity? The memes help amplify a moment that fits into a straightforward narrative.

The deluge of draft-related memes that flowed from the news of  Soleimani’s execution exemplify the mental comfort such clarity brings. The idea of a normal war—an organized military front where national armies face off—became so piquant that it crashed the website for the Selective Service System, the government agency where men over 18 must still register in case of a draft. Even though a U.S. Military draft hasn’t taken place since 1973, some of the memes feign comfort in evading conscription, citing hypothetical age, sex, or medical reasons why their authors might be disqualified.

At Insider, Andria Moore wrote that young people are using the wry humor of memes to cope with uncertainty. And at Buzzfeed News, Otilla Steadman and Ryan C. Brooks portrayed the practice as an expression of fear, carried out on the media formats like Instagram or TikTok that have become native environments for Gen Z.  

Related Slideshow: US-Iran tensions (provided by Photo Services)

But the 18-to-24 set might have no idea what they are thinking or feeling when they create or share these posts. “Nobody is aware of what’s going on,” my Gen Z son texted me from his group of friends. (He’s 20 years old.) “It’s not coping because there’s nothing to cope over,” he theorized, adding that his crew wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the people posting these memes don’t have the faintest idea about the geopolitical circumstances to which they are supposedly responding.

That’s probably the case for people of all ages, thanks in part to the frenetic pace at which everyone produces and consumes information online. “Buckle up, nerds,” the Arc Digital editor Berny Belvedere began in a hilarious viral tweet. “After discovering the existence of Quasar Sailemun thirty minutes ago, I am now ready to explain how, being three trillion times more significant than Bin Laden, his assassination means we will have to forfeit the Louisiana Purchase.”

Instinct and habit rule online, and online life is just life now. The instincts and habits everyone has developed over the past 20 years of forever war involve reacting first, and thinking later—if at all. The news is so ubiquitous that its coverage—from Soleimani’s assassination to all these memes supposedly comforting people in its aftermath—evades more meaning than it elucidates.  

Absent knowledge and intention, the best and most generous way to interpret these World War III memes is to try to understand how they surface the ideology of contemporary life. Memory of the experience of world war is disappearing, as the last of the generation who survived conventional, global warfare pass away. At the same time, conventional war itself became too constant to take notice of; today’s 18 year olds have never taken a breath at a time when the United States wasn’t embroiled in combat in the Middle East.

For GenXers like me, the fear of nuclear annihilation made the end of the world a dark but deviously appealing fantasy. It seemed natural for humankind to dream about witnessing our collective end. No matter your scientific suppositions or religious beliefs about life or afterlife, the glory of human existence became even more bewitching in the event that total annihilation might insure that you would not have missed out on its future, beyond the grasp of your own lifespan.

For many of today’s youths, however, a mortgaged future can already feel likely, if not certain, for much more concrete reasons—from economic inequality to climate-caused extinction. It’s no wonder that their fantasies would look toward the past instead. It is strangely comforting to imagine a conventional war of the 20th-century variety, mated to the risks of nuclear escalation, because it represents a return to a well-worn period of history.

The two World Wars produced horrific atrocities. But they also tipped out into a long period of prosperity and comfort, especially in America. That connects the idea of a world war with other matters: the Greatest Generation, and the idea that military service is noble, thanks to the unvarnished clarity of good and evil; a time when patriotism in general and the war effort in particular was nonpartisan; the social services, tax base, and economic circumstances that produced the middle class and all its benefits, from stable jobs to cheap homeownership.

Also watch: Iran is not prepared for war: Apple-Metro CEO [Fox Business]

Click to expand

Want to become an FBI agent? Here’s how

It’s one of the most coveted jobs in law enforcement, but how do you become an FBI agent?

Boy reunites with his missing cat

This is 11 year-old Logan Overlin from Yelm, Washington. His cat had been missing for weeks, but was then found. His mother took the opportunity to surprise him and capture the emotional reunion between the boy and his pet on camera.

Couple find 5ft long monitor lizard in their car engine

UP NEXT

But that reality is no more. So now what? To fear world war is also to dream of it, and to dream of world war is also to indulge the nostalgia of the mid-century, that great refuge between two gilded ages, when ordinary people thrived.

For A Post-9/11 Generation, War Isn’t New But Fears Of Another One Are

Over high school lunch tables, teenagers spoke of World War III. When they got home, they tearfully asked their parents whether they would be drafted. Social media feeds exploded with predictions of military action and wisecracking memes about end times.

As the United States escalated its conflict with Iran this past week by killing Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, a powerful Iranian commander, Americans scrambled to determine what it all meant for the young men and women whose lives could be upended in the event of an extended conflict.

For now, it remains too soon to tell. The United States’ wars in the Middle East have slogged on, with plenty of tense and foreboding moments, for about as long as most teenagers have been alive. But for a generation of young people who were born after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, or were not old enough at the time to have grasped their impact, the events of the past week signified the most urgent — and perhaps alarming — military escalation in memory.

Adrian Flynn was born a month after the Sept. 11 attacks and he registered for the Selective Service shortly after he turned 18 in October, as all men between 18 and 25 are required to do.

But he and his friends at his Manhattan high school did not give much thought to the ramifications of registering until this past Friday, after a drone strike authorized by President Trump killed General Suleimani and prompted vows of retaliation from Iran.

“Now it’s like, what exactly did we sign up for?” said Mr. Flynn, a senior who was recently accepted to college.

In cafeterias across the country, young men speculate about being sent abroad, even though United States officials have said repeatedly that they do not want a war with Iran, and that reinstating a military draft will require congressional approval.

At this point, registering for the Selective Service has little bearing on the likelihood of being conscripted. That has not done much to assuage many young men, many of whom registered when they applied for college as a prerequisite for federal financial aid. Some states also require young men to register when they apply for a driver’s license.

When Molly Patterson picked up her 17-year-old daughter from school in a suburb of Detroit on Friday, she was stunned when her daughter immediately asked whether her boyfriend would be drafted. The next morning, Ms. Patterson discovered that her 14-year-old son had been up until 3 a.M.; he was feeling stressed after reading about the possibility of war and texting his uncle about whether he could be sent to fight.

Ms. Patterson had not thought of the possibility of a draft, but her daughter said that it was all that people at school were talking about, and that many were even getting alerts on their phones with updates about the airstrike, more than 6,000 miles away. On Saturday, Ms. Patterson found herself trying to quell her children’s fears.

“We all talked about it this morning and I tried to relax them, saying there’s not going to be a war,” Ms. Patterson said on Saturday. “I like to be very, very honest with my children, but I don’t want them to worry about that. That’s for the adults right now. It’s too much for a kid to handle.”

Some young adults joined thousands of antiwar protesters on Saturday at more than 80 demonstrations to condemn the strike in Baghdad that killed General Suleimani.

At one protest in Seattle, Lukas Illa, 19, said he was not too worried about being drafted, but was concerned about the impact a war would have on others, including service personnel who might come from disadvantaged backgrounds. He also said civilians in Iran were more at risk than Americans.

“We’re not going to be affected by this as much as Iranians will be,” Mr. Illa said.

Citlali Perez, 18, of Chicago, had begun to plan how she might mobilize against another protracted war, were it to come to that.

“Mostly how I feel is scared, but also wanting to do something about it and wanting to prevent it,” said Ms. Perez, a freshman at DePaul University who has become involved in antiwar activism.

Ms. Perez said she had seen a mix of fear and galvanization since news of the attacks. She has also seen the memes that have been widely shared online, making jokes about the draft or a hypothetical world war. Some found the posts distasteful, trivializing what had already become a deadly conflict, while others saw them as a way to laugh off their fear. In any case, the rapid spread of the memes was a clear sign of how preoccupied young people were with the airstrike and the looming question of what would come next.

For most, being shipped off to war is still a theoretical peril — a nerve-racking thought perhaps, but not an imminent threat. But for some young men and women, it was now a reality; at Fort Bragg, N.C., 3,500 troops were ordered to the Middle East in one of the largest rapid deployments in years.

Dia Smith, 21, was nervous for her wife, who is in the Army, even before the airstrike: Her wife was told on New Year’s Day that she would be deploying to Iraq. The rising political tensions since then have only made Ms. Smith’s fears worse.

Ms. Smith said her grandfather had served in the military and had come back so mentally scarred that she and her family found it difficult to visit him. She could not help but worry that if the conflict escalated, her friends — or even her wife — could return the same way.

“Growing up as a kid, you hear about the Vietnam War and all these things that are so surreal to me, until you’re in a time or space when you’re like, ‘This is real,’” Ms. Smith said from Fort Bragg. “Being my age, I can see how this can really shape or form the rest of my life, simply because she’s there.”

Ms. Smith is a member of the National Guard and said she had joined to get away from Montgomery, Ala., where she went to high school. She runs a wig business and attends training on the base each month. She had wondered in recent days whether the National Guard could be deployed next.

“I’m waiting on that call for myself, hoping that it doesn’t come,” she said.

Mike Baker, Dan Levin and Mitch Smith contributed reporting.