Is World War 3 Really Right Around the Corner?

There are concerns among many that the crisis in the Middle East sparked by the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, and the subsequent ongoing war in Gaza, could be the early stages of a world war.

And while it certainly has all the makings of the first major Middle Eastern modern regional war, it doesn’t yet have enough combustible power to ignite a world war. And, yes, that’s despite the killing on Saturday of three U.S. service personnel and the injuring of dozens more in a drone attack in Jordan, near the Syrian border, which the White House blames on Iranian-backed radical groups operating in Iraq and Syria.

However, it could easily prove to be one of several major regional fronts around the world in which revisionist powers push back, perhaps decisively, against the U.S.-led “rules-based order.”

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HOW THE WAR COULD STAY LOCAL BUT UPEND THE WORLD

A regional war emerging out of the Gaza crisis would essentially pit Iran—a second-tier but highly aggressive revisionist and revolutionary power committed to overturning the regional and global balance of power—against a loose network of status quo-oriented countries aligned with Washington.

If the various simmering fronts that have opened up in the Middle East—particularly at the Israel-Lebanon border, in the Red Sea, and through attacks on U.S troops and facilities by pro-Iranian radicals—should erupt in a major regional confrontation, even if it's a series of interconnected rather than fully integrated conflicts, the outcome could easily prove as decisive to the trajectory of international relations as the war in Ukraine and growing tensions over Taiwan.

Already, Moscow and Beijing are quite firmly on Tehran’s side in the confrontation with Washington, and there is little doubt that all four countries understand the potential macro-historic stakes involved should the Middle East ignite.

Thus far, the Israel-Hamas conflict has remained largely contained to Gaza, which is certainly a limited and tenuous, but significant, success for the Biden administration’s policy priorities on the crisis.

In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacres, Biden made it quite clear that his focus was on containing the conflict to Gaza and preventing a cascade of circumstances developing that could drag Hezbollah (and ultimately Washington or Tehran, or both) into full-blown conflict.

For the first month or so, this appeared to be successful. The administration combined a bear-hug of support for Israel on Gaza with a strong restraining hand preventing a “preemptive” attack against Hezbollah in Lebanon—as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant was pressing for around Oct. 11. And the naval buildup in the eastern Mediterranean sent a strong message, if one were needed, to Hezbollah (and ultimately, Iran) that the Lebanese group had better stay out of the fray.

Having apparently succeeded in containing the conflict, team Biden turned its attention increasingly towards pressuring Israel to adopt less scorched-earth tactics as the war moved into Gaza’s south. But in recent weeks, that success looks increasingly fragile. Conflicts and confrontation have greatly intensified on three key fronts, with Biden’s goal of conflict containment being challenged by friend and foe alike.

ISRAELI ESCALATION TO THE NORTH

At the Israel-Lebanon border, the expected flashpoint, it isn’t the U.S. antagonist and Hamas ally, Hezbollah, which is escalating at every turn, but Israel.

Indeed, from the outset, Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, made it clear to the trained observer in both word and deed that they wanted nothing to do with another war with Israel under these circumstances.

That’s hardly surprising. Suffering from economic meltdown, political paralysis, and state dysfunction, Lebanon is in no position to sustain even a limited conflict with Israel, and the Israelis don’t appear to be in a mood to hold back. Hezbollah would never be forgiven by other Lebanese—and even many of its own presumptive and actual Shiite constituents—for dragging the country into another unnecessary and utterly devastating conflict for no articulable national reason.

Furthermore, Hezbollah’s patron, Iran, has no interest in wasting its trump card—the militarily potent Lebanese militia group (probably the most powerful non-state military in human history) with its massive, and often precision guided, arsenal of 150,000 missiles and rockets—on an area as strategically, culturally and religiously marginal to Iranian interests as Gaza, or to save an unreliable on-again-off-again ally like Hamas. To the contrary, Hezbollah’s role is to serve as a key deterrent protecting Iran and its nuclear facilities from potential Israeli or American attack.

Israel, on the other hand, has been pressing the fight in recent weeks.

On Jan. 2 an Israeli drone strike assassinated a key Hamas leader, Saleh Al-Arouri, in a Hezbollah stronghold neighborhood of Beirut. Nasrallah fulminated, but Hezbollah’s response was a clearly restrained and essentially symbolic rocket attack on an Israeli radar station that caused no deaths or injuries and didn’t even knock the facility offline. Israel, however, retaliated by killing Wissam al-Tawil, the deputy commander of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force that operates in the border region.

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That major escalation has, thus far, gone essentially unavenged. Most significantly, Israel has recently laid down an ultimatum for Hezbollah, demanding that Radwan and other key forces be withdrawn from the south of the country to above the Litani River.

Israel is citing UN Security Council Resolution 1701, adopted in the aftermath of the last major Israel-Hezbollah war in 2006. It’s a reasonable interpretation of the resolution, but it’s quite rich for Israel to be demanding the implementation of Security Council resolutions, given its unparalleled track record of ignoring scores of them, especially regarding the occupied Palestinian territories.

More plausibly, Gallant and others are insisting that the 80,000 Israelis evacuated from the north cannot return to their homes in security unless Hezbollah’s fighters are withdrawn or evicted from their south Lebanon homeland. This bears all the hallmarks of a pretext, because the evacuations had not taken place when Gallant and others began demanding a “preemptive war,” and, anyway, the removal of Radwan fighters a few kilometers north would not ease the main Hezbollah threat to Israel, which is its rocket and missile arsenal.

The ultimatum remains on the table, even as the Biden administration’s point person on this flashpoint, Amos Hochstein, has been desperately seeking a diplomatic solution that would appease Israel. But it’s more likely that Israel hasn’t acted either because President Biden—bolstered by his unwavering support for Israel’s terrible war of vengeance in Gaza—has made U.S. objections crystal clear, or because the Israelis have been bluffing, or, very plausibly, a bit of both.

Nonetheless, Israel continues to demand Hezbollah voluntarily remove its forces from its heartland and birthplace in southern Lebanon or face an all-out Israeli attack. So the situation remains alarmingly volatile.

HOUTHIS TAKE TO THE WORLD STAGE

In the Red Sea, the threat to Biden’s policy may be even graver, since the U.S. is already involved in an exchange of strikes with the Yemeni Houthi militants—but in this case it is Washington’s antagonists that are escalating at every turn.

The Red Sea is the unexpected flashpoint, since this crisis marks the dramatic and disturbing debut of the Houthis on the international stage. Heretofore, they’ve been involved in the civil war in Yemen and fighting with the Arab countries (most notably Saudi Arabia, but also the United Arab Emirates) that intervened in that conflict in 2015.

While the intervention proved to be a quagmire for Riyadh (and therefore surely a mistake), far too many in Washington (especially congressional Democrats) somehow failed to comprehend that an organization whose official slogan is “God Is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curses On the Jews, Victory to Islam” might indeed be, as the Saudis insisted, a serious menace not limited to Yemen.

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While Hezbollah wants nothing to do with the crisis, the Houthis jumped at the chance at a confrontation with the West in general and the United States in particular. The organization appears to not only have quaffed gallons of its own Kool-Aid, it’s apparently looking to legitimize the huge amount of power it grabbed by force in northern Yemen, and to solidify its centrality to the Iran-directed “axis of resistance.”

Indeed, the Houthis might even be in the early stages of challenging Hezbollah for primacy in that militia network. The Houthis conducted over 27 attacks on commercial vessels in international shipping lanes in the Red Sea after October 17, leading to repeated retaliatory airstrikes from the U.S., the U.K. and others.

The Yemeni radicals appear to be relishing the confrontation, and there is every indication that they had been receiving not merely support, but encouragement from Iran. This proxy piracy on behalf of Tehran helps to amplify two messages the Iranians have been sending since the last year of the Donald Trump presidency, in which Tehran sought to offset his “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign with its own “maximum resistance” gray zone warfare, mainly against commercial shipping in the Persian/Arabian Gulf.

The first point is that either Iran—and, now, its regional proxies—are de facto participants in maritime security arrangements in the crucial waters around the Arabian Peninsula—which include three of the world’s eight major maritime chokepoints—or such understandings won’t reliably exist. The implicit corollary is that if Iran cannot sell and ship its oil freely—because of U.S. or international sanctions, for instance—then no one else can be sure of buying, selling, and shipping goods unmolested either.

The confrontation with the Houthis over Red Sea piracy may have already turned kinetic and dragged in the United States, but that doesn't mean that the Biden administration’s conflict containment policy has dramatically or decisively failed.

The Houthis are claiming to act on behalf of Hamas and against Israel, but attacks on international shipping do nothing to help the former and little to harm the latter. The Houthis are opportunistically grabbing onto the regional crisis for their own purposes, much as ISIS was when it sought to remind everyone of its existence by conducting a deadly pair of bombings in Iran on Jan. 3.

Even if Houthi piracy against commercial shipping persists for months or even years, much as Somali piracy did between 2000-2017, that does not constitute or even signal a wider regional war. It certainly has the potential to deteriorate into increasing provocations and retaliations on either side that eventually spiral out of all control and bring in other players, most notably Iran.

But, as with the Hezbollah calculation, it’s overwhelmingly likely that here, too, Iran wants to stay out of any major confrontation with either the U.S. or Israel. Therefore, Iran is likely to enjoy the chaos spread by the Houthi attacks and the twin messages they send on behalf of Tehran and its “axis of resistance,” but ultimately be prepared to restrain the Yemeni extremists from going too far and kicking off a descent into regional conflagration that would seriously threaten Iran's own national security.

There are other sources of instability at work, including attacks directed against U.S. forces and facilities in Syria and Iraq by other Iranian-backed Arab militia groups, and a very distantly (if at all) connected confrontation between Iran and Pakistan.

The problem of Houthi piracy may prove to be a prolonged, but ultimately also contained, one. It is the Israel-Lebanon border that was always likely to prove the most dangerous flashpoint outside of Gaza.

But the Biden administration has a huge advantage in seeking to prevent another major Israel-Hezbollah war: the only party that appears to want one is Israel, over which Washington, its primary benefactor and, when it comes to the Gaza war, increasingly its sole defender, has enormous leverage. It’s still possible that Israel could act in defiance and disregard of categorical American objections, or that miscalculations could lead to an unintended unraveling of all control. But if the U.S. had to pick one party as the belligerent it needs to restrain, it would much prefer Israel than Hezbollah or Iran.

HOW INVOLVED WILL THE U.S. GET?

The nightmare scenarios write themselves. The most obvious involves a potential U.S. overreaction to the attack in Jordan or a further escalation by pro-Iranian radical groups. Particularly after the weekend’s attack against U.S. forces, it’s become clear that unless Iran wants to court an uncontrolled regional conflict that also involves the United States, it’s going to have to get a grip on its network of Arab militia proxies. And it’s got every incentive to do that given that Tehran is moving rapidly towards de facto nuclear weapons status while the world’s attention is turned to more immediately urgent matters in the Middle East.

And what if Hezbollah refuses to capitulate and Israel attacks? Or Hezbollah suddenly recalculates and escalates with Israel? Miscalculations on either side could lead to increasing reprisals to “restore deterrence,” quickly leading to a disastrous war.

At that point, especially if it goes badly for Israel and Hezbollah bears some of the blame, the U.S. might feel compelled to intervene. Conversely, Iran may feel compelled to intervene on behalf of Hezbollah. Israel may declare that it is tired of battling Tehran’s Arab proxies and is now going to take the war directly to its presumed origin.

It’s all too easy to imagine such scenarios leading to a U.S.-Iran confrontation and—as right-wing Israelis have tried but failed to secure for 20 years—American strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, with the “axis of resistance” striking back in full fury throughout the region and, conceivably, through terrorist attacks around the world.

Would that constitute or spark a world war? No. But we are probably looking at a major inflection point for the U.S. role in the Middle East.

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If Washington fails in its quest to contain the conflict in Gaza and finds itself increasingly drawn into flashpoints and escalations in a Middle East that appears to be descending into regional conflict, it will almost certainly be perceived to be another serious failure of American policy and massive blow to the U.S.’ role as the regional guarantor of stability and security.

If, on the other hand, the Biden administration can continue to essentially contain the conflict to Gaza, greatly ease or end the fighting there over the next couple of months, and begin to steer the Middle Eastern ship back into the harbor of increased calm and away from the typhoon of regional conflict, the crisis is likely to prove a significant step toward the restoration of U.S. credibility and authority in that still-vital region.

Failure might lead to a regional, but not a world, war. But that failure could greatly contribute to the global success of revisionist and insurgent actors, including Washington’s great power rivals Russia and, especially, China.

It would also mark one of the great regional turning points away from the Western-dominated “rules-based order” and towards not merely a more multipolar international system but one in which—to a degree unprecedented since World War II—might makes right.