So is this World War III? The term doesn’t mean anything, and that’s a problem
Sometimes it’s in our best interest to avoid the advice of economic professionals. In this case, I refer to Henry Morgenthau Jr., secretary of the Treasury under President Harry Truman, whose 1944 “Post-Surrender Program for Germany” was widely attacked as a collective punishment that might result in the death by starvation of 25 million people. One report at the time described it as “barely above the level of ‘sterilize all Germans.’”
Morgenthau’s plan to demilitarize and deindustrialize Germany was seized upon by the failing Nazi regime as a propaganda tool, and the Truman administration ultimately rejected it. Instead of the Morgenthau Plan, the U.S. went with the now-legendary Marshall Plan, which allowed for the rebuilding and reshaping of Western Europe to suit American interests, at a cost of about $150 billion in today’s dollars. That led to nearly 50 years of expanding prosperity during the period often described as Pax Americana.
Well, so much for that. Warfare never really ended, but it became a relatively rare event in the decades after World War II. In this century, that trend has reversed — and the U.S. is clearly culpable in many of these conflicts. In 2025 alone, the U.S. bombed seven different countries across three continents: Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Yemen and Somalia. This year is already on track to maintain that record as the Pentagon begs for another $200 billion to continue its thorougly unnecessary attacks on Iran. Who can we thank for all this more than Donald “The Dove” Trump, who chairs the “Board of Peace” while eyeing even more regime change, in Cuba and elsewhere.
Trump’s Board of Peace, which seemingly applies a corporate pay-to-play logic to the mission of the United Nations, held its first meeting on Feb. 19. Time will tell if it ever meets again. Member states mostly talked dues and building a pseudo-police force to control Gaza. Just nine days later, two of its member states, the U.S. and Israel, launched an attack on Iran that has so far left more than 1,500 dead in Iran and 1,000 in Lebanon, while retaliatory strikes from Iran have killed at least 18 in Israel, 13 U.S. soldiers and 21 others in nearby Gulf states.
Even more alarming, there’s a real possibility this conflict could get more destructive than any present-tense statistics can convey. On March 18, Politico reported that the World Health Organization is prepping for nuclear catastrophe if the fighting intensifies. Hanan Balkhy, WHO regional director for the eastern Mediterranean, said “We are thinking about it, and we’re just really hoping that it does not happen.”
Yeah, that’s an understatement. A single nuclear device detonated in a city, whether it’s Tel Aviv, Tehran or Washington, would immediately qualify as one of the worst events of this century. In the 10 seconds it takes a nuclear explosion to reach its maximum size, hundreds of thousands of people are likely to die almost instantly. Many hiding underground would likely perish shortly after that, asphyxiated by lack of oxygen.
Outside the blast radius, ionizing radiation from a nuclear bomb would drift downward, killing and sickening anyone and anything it touches. Cancers would be widespread among survivors, while the resulting pollution could cause crop failures, further threatening mass casualties numbering in the millions and environmental degradation so severe it would make everything from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the Bhopal gas disaster look like a day at the beach. That’s basically what happened when the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — but these early weapons of mass destruction were much smaller compared to what’s in the arsenal of modern-day nuclear nations, including both the U.S. and Israel.
Again, that’s just imagining one bomb. The global stockpile of nuclear warheads is estimated to be 12,241 across nine nations, so like Balkhy, let’s cross our fingers that none of them go off. As a 2019 review in the Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament put it: “In an actual full-scale nuclear war in which several hundred average-size (100-kiloton) atomic bombs are exchanged, the total damage to humanity and urban infrastructure is beyond our imagination and calculation. A possible outcome caused by such a large-scale nuclear war is an extinction of Homo sapiens.”
The WHO is right to be preparing for this disastrous outcome while of course hoping we never come anywhere near it. That’s the attitude anyone who values continued life on this planet should adopt. Any war in which any party involved possesses nuclear weapons multiples this risk — yet we hardly talk about that risk, except in the context of a popular video game series turned Prime Video show.
Maybe we need a 3D-animated remake of “Dr. Strangelove” to convince today’s distracted generations that nuclear bombs are not an aesthetic. They are as existential as climate change, rising fascism and pandemics.
Sure, there’s random talk about “World War III,” a term that shows up in numerous headlines in all sorts of bizarre contexts. Even former Trump fan Joe Rogan has criticized the president’s latest war, saying it could get “really ugly, because that’s how you start a World War III.” A recent Emerson College poll found that 63% of likely voters believed it was “somewhat or very likely” that a world war will break out within the next four years. Polling from almost a year ago painted a similar picture.
On Jan. 27, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that the world is now “85 seconds to midnight,” the closest in history we have ever been to “midnight,” meant to represent the moment of apocalypse. I’ve never been sure that I fully vibed with what the Bulletin puts out, though I respect its intentions. I’d be curious to know what update it might provide right now. If this message were really getting through to people, maybe we’d see riots, a general strike or perhaps even a global understanding that we need to hunker down and work together, not unlike the general response to the COVID-19 pandemic in its early stages.
But perhaps World War III has now been meme-ified to the point of not meaning anything anymore. It’s just what people say when a given conflict gets too big to ignore amid the doom-scroll blitz of celebrity fallouts and political grifting.
Social media trends with “World War III” references every time there’s a noticeable uptick in global tensions. It happened when Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in 2020. It’s happening again, a lot, as the U.S.-Israel war with Iran escalates. But does this carry any meaning for any real people, and will it be enough to stop us from pushing ourselves off the cliff? Maybe we need a 3D-animated remake of “Dr. Strangelove” to convince today’s distracted generations that nuclear bombs are not an aesthetic. They are as existential as climate change, rising fascism and pandemics.
Part of the problem is that it’s unclear what “war” even means in the 21st century. It looks barely recognizable, compared to historical footage or war movies of the past. This allows events to balloon beyond our comprehension, and may be preventing us from stopping this insanity.
Approximately two centuries ago, Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote that “War is more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case. As a total phenomenon its dominant tendencies always make war a paradoxical trinity — composed of primordial violence, hatred and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone.”
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Clausewitz might have enjoyed seeing how this “creative spirit” has evolved in our era. It’s weird to be alive at a time when much of contemporary warfare comprises literal laser beams, flying robots and dungeons full of nerds at computer terminals, but that’s really what’s happening. All this cyber-warfare, in fact, may be making the old way of doing things — cluster bombs tanks, artillery and even infantry — a second-class form. For now, these modes certainly complement each other, as a recent Iranian attack on a U.S. medical company’s data demonstrates. “Cyber and physical warfare,” Nick Lichtenberg concluded in Fortune last week, “are no longer separate domains.”
Cyber-warfare is sometimes described as occurring on an “invisible battlefield,” but it doesn’t just involve malware and viruses. It gets inside your head, infecting the digital realm so connected to our collective psyches, awash in social media and streaming algorithms. And so-called artificial intelligence, of course, is adding napalm to this dumpster fire. There’s a point to this litany of chaos. When we think of a “world war,” our minds go back to HBO adaptations about brothers in trenches or black-and-white newsreels of planes dropping bombs, tanks rumbling through mud, tattered flags waving in wisps of smoke. So much of the pointless suffering and the civilian casualties get glossed over, but there’s a general sense that there was a justification for all this, a narrative that made some sense, an enemy to be vanquished, and an end to the violence.
The fears of World War III that arose by the late 1940s weren’t just about the new destructive power of nuclear weapons, but about preventing all of it from ever happening again. That should still be our goal, but it won’t be possible unless we recognize how different, and how truly chameleon-like, today’s wars are.
It’s weird to be alive at a time when much of contemporary warfare comprises literal laser beams, flying robots and dungeons full of nerds at computer terminals, but that’s really what’s happening.
War is now happening everywhere, all the time, and involves the whole globe in some way. Modern conflicts are defined by casually slamming drones into distant locations from thousands of miles away by pressing a button, or by purging a server of critical information, or by weaponizing perception itself with deepfakes and poison-barbed algorithms. It’s all the traditional stuff too, the selling of weapons and building of border walls and proxy wars on a Risk board, but with real, human consequences. The ripple effects are genuine and we can all feel them if we’re willing to pay attention.
“This transformation of war in the 21st century has rendered war incapable of fulfilling its historical roles, whether as a means of achieving peace or enacting justice,” write philosophers Oluyemi Opeoluwa Adisa and Kareem Shwan Adham in a remarkable study published last year in the International Journal of Scientific Research and Management. They go on to explain the vacuum in our present-day war machine:
The evolution of warfare has not been accompanied by a corresponding evolution in the mechanisms for achieving or sustaining peace. When the fighting pauses, the deeper damage often remains. Psychological trauma, social fragmentation, and economic dislocation are persistent scars that can span generations. The modern world teeters in a precarious state of “not-war,” a liminal space marked by unrest, unresolved grievances, and latent violence. In conflict zones, this ambiguity is particularly pronounced. …
The idea that “there will be no victor or vanquished” is not poetic fatalism, it is empirical reality. Whether in Kyiv or Khan Younis, war has ceased to be a mechanism for conflict resolution and has instead become a perpetuator of instability, humiliation and loss.
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If we go by that framework, does the Iran war actually constitute World War III? After decades of nail-biting and false alarms, has it finally arrived? One could argue that, yes, this is indeed a global conflict that keeps getting bigger, directly involves nearly a dozen countries and affects almost every corner of the world. Otherwise, the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz wouldn’t cause such an uproar. But there might be a stronger argument in saying that the Cold War wasn’t all that cold: Ask the people of Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan and so on. Semantics, in this case, matter. Language, the bare minimum of our understanding, is what prevents us from being blind to risk and suffering.
Perhaps we are now choosing the Morgenthau path, but instead of “sterilizing all Germans” we are now aiming to sterilize all humans, everywhere. Nuclear war could be understood as the final extension of the carcinogenic capitalist mindset that growth and consumption can keep on going forever, with no consequences, as long as we have the biggest explosives. Whether we call this World War III or come up with a new name, we need to put the weapons down.
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