Are we on the precipice of World War III?

Shortly after U.S. and Israeli bombs and missiles began falling in Tehran, Iranian missiles flew in all directions at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and others. The people living in these countries were justifiably terrified, which was a likely objective of those Iranian leaders who survived the first assaults. Tehran’s strategy may be to persuade America’s regional allies to reconsider their security alliances.

In 2010, most people shook their heads when a now-infamous map of Afghanistan’s various societal, governmental, and tribal interests went public. The counterinsurgency (COIN) spaghetti chart was terribly complex – and intractable. One PowerPoint slide shows how challenging it can be to understand how a stimulant in one corner can produce a response in a seemingly tangential sector. And this is just a single country.

Imagine a chart depicting the world’s alliances, treaties, trade agreements, cultural bonds, and religious ties today. It would be so complex that no one could fully understand how everything fits together and interacts. Should one player choose to escalate the conflict, there is no telling who else might get involved. In an age of nuclear weapons on hairpin triggers, events can rapidly spin out of control before any of the key players has a chance to truly understand what is really happening. Our civilization could end in minutes, and it will only be a matter of luck if any human beings survive. If any people do survive, it is likely that they will never really know precisely how the end of the world started.

The global situation is eerily similar to 1913. In the years leading up to World War I, European leaders created an intricate system of alliances. France and Russia signed a mutual defense pact. Germany and Austro-Hungary had a similar arrangement. The Russians also had a cultural bond with their fellow Slavs in Serbia.

So, when Franz Ferdinand and his wife were murdered by a Serbian nationalist in June 1914, the resulting diplomatic crisis and war declaration by Austria-Hungary against Serbia pulled Russia into the war. The Russian mobilization prompted the Germans to mobilize. In quick succession, the Germans declared war on Russia, France, and Belgium. When German troops entered Luxembourg and Belgium, Great Britain declared war on Germany, and World War I began for real. The international network established by those early 20th century leaders was so precarious, it only took a relatively minor jostle in a forgotten corner of Europe to bring the entire system crashing to the ground.

The world today is vastly more complex. In 1913, there were approximately 61 sovereign states, but the key players were the major European empires like Great Britain, Russia, France, and Germany. Today, there are 195 countries, each striving for their place on the world stage as they pursue their national interest. It is impossible to calculate the potential number of black swan events capable of jostling the geostrategic network sufficiently to collapse it on top of itself.

Consider this as well: we may already be in the beginning stages of a global war. Victor Davis Hanson wrote about how World War II only looks like World War II in hindsight. For the people living through it, especially in the beginning, World War II looked like a series of rather ordinary border conflicts and territorial conquests. The Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931 and then further expanded the conflict with China in 1937. Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935. Germany remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936, annexed Austria in 1938, and occupied the Sudetenland six months later.

Today, Russia is still fighting in Ukraine. Gaza remains an open wound. The United States captured the president of Venezuela in an audacious military raid. Now the Iranian regime has been decapitated, but the remaining officials appear bent on provoking a larger war by lashing out at every country in the region that hosts U.S. military facilities.

This raises the uncomfortable question: are we now on the precipice of the next Pearl Harbor moment?

With the capture of President Maduro in Venezuela, the United States disrupted the flow of oil to China. Now, with the fall of the Islamic Republic of Iran, China appears poised to lose another important source of oil. Does anyone remember what prompted the Japanese to strike the American Pacific Fleet and then declare war against the United States? Those who answered the loss of access to key commodities, notably oil, due to actions by the United States responded correctly.

The same leaders who developed the pre-World War I international system also spent the years before Sarajevo engaged in a decades-long arms race. Most of them had read Alfred Thayer Mahan’s writing about the importance of seapower, so several countries invested huge amounts of capital building dreadnought ships. Hiram Maxim inspired a slew of weapon designers to develop more effective machine guns. The world’s aviators were just beginning to imagine the warfighting potential of the airplane.

No one in 1913 understood quite how the industrial age had changed warfare. The leaders were all still playing by the old international rules that sufficed while armies fought in rank and file on relatively limited and distant battlefields. Had those early 20th century leaders foreseen the trenches and poison gas, they almost certainly would not have celebrated the war’s beginning. Many of the key players also lacked any direct experience with war, which tends to encourage recklessness. The last major European war was the Franco-Prussian War that ended in 1871. Before that, the last truly significant European battle had been Waterloo in 1815.

No leader in any country today has any experience with war on a global scale. World War II ended more than 80 years ago. The relatively few remaining World War II veterans are all centenarians or soon will be. No one can truly know how the next world war will unfold. If, by some miracle, the next war is not fought with nuclear weapons, it is still impossible for anyone to know for certain how a conventional war between superpowers will be fought.

Policymakers around the world must take the time to reflect on the state of the world today. We may be living through the early days of what future historians will call World War III. Of course, that depends on there being any future historians. With every bomb dropped, every missile fired, and every warship torpedoed, events creep ever closer to the single jostle, the 21st century Sarajevo, to topple the fragile network. It will only take one minor miscalculation, one bomb to miss and fall on another country’s embassy, one airliner to be accidentally shot out of the sky, or any other of a million incidents to trigger an escalation leading to a full nuclear exchange.

There may be time left to prevent such a scenario. The administration and the U.S. military deserve credit for planning and executing two spectacular displays of martial prowess in less than two weeks. But they should also bear in mind that victory is far from guaranteed. Luck, fate, and the enemy have a say in the outcome of any conflict. It is easy to believe that modern military technology has eliminated war’s uncertainty. But war will always remain a human endeavor, serving human ends.

The administration must bring the current operation with Iran to a quick end. It can celebrate its successes but should not push their luck any further. Every military operation is the geostrategic version of Russian roulette.