World War III will not start with an exchange of nuclear weapons. It won’t ignite from the jostling of great empires. Nor will it result from a single madman (or two) bent on taking over the world.
It won’t be any of those things because World War III has already begun.
The current global conflagration began not with the joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran. It began with the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. This blatant land grab was not only a massive war crime. Russian President Vladimir Putin also had another target in mind: the rules-based order.
This attack on international law was the Fort Sumter moment for World War III. By invading Ukraine—and then systematically breaking one article of the Geneva Convention after another—Putin effectively seceded from the international community.
There have been other major violations of international law since the end of the Cold War, including the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the U.S. drone attacks in various countries, Israel’s multiple incursions into Lebanon, Rwanda’s invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and so on.
But none of these attacks, however abhorrent, challenged the fundamental structure of the rules-based order like Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Putin didn’t try to enlist the UN on his side, as Bush did in Iraq and Obama did in Libya. He didn’t seize land temporarily to create a buffer zone as Israel has attempted to do in Lebanon. Rather, he was determined to force regime change in Kyiv and undermine the entire European security system.
In Iran, Donald Trump is simply following Putin’s game plan. Like Putin, he expected a quick victory, so much so that he didn’t arrange military escorts for tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz or prepare for an emergency drawdown from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to offset the inevitable spike in gas prices. Like Putin, he didn’t bother to rally the UN to his side or even build a coalition of the willing. Like Putin, he expected (and continues to expect) to install a puppet government that can do his bidding.
Also like Putin, who took Russia out of the Council of Europe and the UN Human Rights Council, Trump has withdrawn from as many international institutions as he can, from the World Health Organization to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Russia and the United States have become partners in secession, despite the Kremlin’s protests to the contrary.
“We have all lost what we call international law,” a Russian spokesman said in the aftermath of the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran. “I don’t even understand how anyone can be called upon to follow the norms and principles of international law. It effectively no longer exists.”
The guy’s right. Sort of. He’s off by four years. And his country is the OG.
Trump generally follows the lead of others when it comes to major military operations. He only bombed Iran over the summer after Israel took the initiative. He has attacked Iran this time only because Israel is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. He probably would have seized Greenland if, say, Alberta secessionists had sent an initial amphibious unit.
And now Trump has stuck his knife into the body of international law—after Putin already severed its femoral artery.
What Comes Next?
To understand what happens next in Iran, the latest front in World War III, just look to Vladimir Putin.
Any sane world leader would have agreed to a ceasefire in Ukraine by this point. Putin doesn’t meet that particular definition of sanity.
The Russian leader has watched his country jettison its geopolitical position, with allies in Armenia, Syria, Venezuela, and now Iran left exposed and vulnerable. Putin has lost a great swath of Russia’s “best and brightest” to war and exile, sacrificing more soldiers in Ukraine at this point than he can recruit. The Russian economy has finally come down off its sugar high of military Keynesianism, with growth bottoming out and debt mounting rapidly. Not even the current spike in oil prices can help stabilize the Russian economy as long as Putin continues to bang his head against Ukrainian fortifications in the Donbas. Russia’s loss of Starlink data has even enabled Ukrainians to seize back more territory in the last couple weeks than Russia has managed to grab.
Donald Trump, having failed to achieve his initial objectives, would be well-advised to agree to a ceasefire in Iran. But he, too, doesn’t meet that particular definition of sanity.
Trump continues to insist that his action in Venezuela should be the template for Iran. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he is still looking for the Iranian version of Delcy Rodriguez, the Venezuelan leader he has coopted. He continues to call for Iran to surrender even as Tehran vows to revenge the assassination of its leader, the death of more than 1,200 citizens, and the destruction of its infrastructure. He hasn’t ruled out the introduction of ground troops (or the use of proxies if he can somehow convince the Kurds that America won’t abandon them yet again).
Meanwhile, the conflict isn’t even two weeks old, and the toll on Trump and the United States has been huge. Russia’s military reputation suffered enormously because of its inability to defeat Ukraine. So, too, has the Iran war revealed weaknesses in U.S. power such as the deficit in weapons necessary to sustain an effort of this scale, the imprecise targeting that produced the horrific bombing of an elementary school, and the general inability to dictate facts on the ground despite overwhelming force.
At home, polling suggests that a majority of Americans oppose the war. Even some Trump supporters who naively believed that their leader would focus on domestic issues rather than be drawn into a Mideast quagmire are furious, while others, particularly in Congress, simply look foolish for contradicting their previously held “anti-war” positions. Before gas prices started to rise, Trump was already having difficulty wrapping his mind around “affordability.” With war, tariffs, and lavishly funded ICE operations, Republicans are practically dead in the water on pocketbook issues with mid-term elections rapidly approaching.
None of that will push Trump toward compromise. At least Putin has deep ideological reasons—connected to the expansion of the Russian lebensraum—for insisting on his war aims in Ukraine. No one is really sure why Trump launched the war in Iran. He has thrown out lots of rationales in the hopes that one will pass the plausibility test—Iran threatened U.S. national security (no), the United States had to preempt Iranian attacks after Israeli strikes (what?!), Iran tried to assassinate him (a stretch), Iran has a nuclear program (true, but didn’t Trump also say that he’d destroyed it over the summer?).
The decision to attack probably came down to Trump’s desire to outdo all his modern presidential predecessors. During his first term, he focused on North Korea because a solution to the nuclear crisis there had eluded Obama. Now he wants to be the president who has done what his elders and betters could not do: restores U.S. dignity after nearly 50 years of humiliation at the hands of the ayatollahs.
Good luck with that.
Should I Be Moving to a Bunker?
The war in Iran has already become a regional conflict, with Israel attacking Lebanon, Iran launching missiles at targets in the Gulf States and beyond, and Shia militias in Iraq entering the fray. It could escalate if Shia communities rise up en masse in the Middle East and/or majority Sunni governments crack down. Iran’s “axis of resistance,” although weakened by the fall of Bashar al-Assad and Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah and Hamas, could still mobilize for a long-haul conflict, like the Iraq War insurgency on steroids.
It’s true that the Iran War has already generated major protests in South Asia. But with Russia and China pushing for a negotiated solution, the war is not likely to become a global conflict.
But World War III is not about a particular armed conflict. It’s about the assault on the international order by ruthless authoritarian leaders: Putin, Trump, Netanyahu. It’s the attempt to dismantle the structures that have maintained a very imperfect semblance of peace since 1945. The very mechanisms designed to prevent another world war—the United Nations, global trade mechanisms, the human rights architecture—are melting away.
A ceasefire in Iran is not out of reach. The pressure of Gulf states, the relative non-cooperation of European allies, the fracturing of the MAGA coalition, overall U.S. public opinion in the face of a worsening economy, and the continued resistance of the government in Tehran: all of these factors could lead to the end of the Iran War.
Ending World War III is a different matter. That will require defeating not just one autocrat but several. It will require remaking internationalism to the benefit of everyone who has been left behind by globalization. It will require a universal recognition of the huge costs of war, militarism, fossil fuel use, and immense concentrations of wealth.
World War II produced enormous suffering. But after 1945, the world was reborn.
World War III has produced comparable sacrifices so far in Ukraine and Russia, in Gaza and Iran, in Sudan and Myanmar. But it’s not too early to prepare now for the end of this latest global cataclysm.