How far to WW3, sir?

The man who saved the world: Soviet Lieutenant-Colonel Stanislav Petrov

That we have not yet destroyed the world with nuclear weapons is a miracle of good luck that cannot last forever. On at least twenty occasions we have nearly had a nuclear war by accident, miscalculation or conflict escalation.

The above was spoken on May 30th by Alyn Ware of the Basel Peace Office, at a screening of The Man who Saved the World, the award-winning film about just one such close shave of the thermonuclear kind.

Food for thought when humans are more psychological than logical animals, and as such prone to mistaking a lifelong threat which hasn’t yet materialised for one which never could. The more so when a sense of powerlessness – yes, in putative democracies! – combines with our childlike fondness for the glittering distractions and glib comforts of media which might not tell us what to think but assuredly tell us what to think about.

Meanwhile the usual suspects – Blinken, Sullivan and smirking State Department spokesman Matthew Miller – would have us believe US diplomacy (an oxymoron if ever I saw one ¹ ) has stick-and-carrotted Iran into abandoning or dialling down to token level a retaliation everyone else knows is coming after Israel’s July 31st murder in Tehran of chief Hamas negotiator Ismail Haniyeh.

Nobody with half a brain is buying it.

An Yves Smith post on Naked Capitalism, August 9, ran with the header, US Deploys Pathetic Wizard of Oz Messaging Strategy to Pretend It Can Influence Iran Conflict Trajectory. We needn’t be fully au fait  with Lyman Frank Baum’s iconic creation to get the gist. For his part The Duran’s Alexander Mercouris, in a shade under fourteen minutes on Iran’s war of nerves with neocons, offers two distinct but compatible hypotheses on Washington delusionality as being:

… wishful thinking, of which probably there is a significant dose; or possibly the Iranians themselves stringing the Americans along.

The world and its grandma knows the USA’s sole point of leverage here, at least in theory, is on Israel. So it’s hard to fault Caitlin Johnstone’s assessment, also of August 9. This too packs a self explanatory header in US Policy: Let Israel Escalate, Then Tell Iran Not to Escalate Back.

You’ll never see western officials so enthusiastic about the idea of de-escalation as they are when their side just severely escalated tensions with an extreme act of aggression, but the other side has yet to retaliate. They remind you of a parent who lets their kid run around clobbering other children at the playground, then when another child goes to hit them back they rush in and start yelling about the need to play nice.

They’ve been doing this song and dance for the last few days, ever since it became clear Iran was going to retaliate for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh while he was a guest on their territory. 

So we are where we are. And where we are, in the Middle East no less than Ukraine – and for the same reason; a waning empire with the means to destroy the world a thousand times over steered by men and women with the maturity and strategic vision, if you’ll excuse the insult to simianity, of adolescent chimpanzees – is closer to Armageddon than at any point in history. ^{2 3}

The incalculables include:

• applications of the prisoner’s dilemma to questions of whether to strike first;
• Tehran restraint being read as weakness, inviting more escalation not less from Israel …
• … thereby incentivising Iran, a threshold nuclear power, to take that final step;
• Iran’s dead hand capacity to annihilate Israel – even by conventional means and even after a nuclear strike by “the Jewish State”;
• Israel’s adoption of Nixon’s ploy of projecting irrationality which, from a government whose nominal head is himself a hostage to eschatologists of Smotrich and Ben Gvr stamp, just might be the real deal.

I’ll close with two further reads. One is my post of four months ago, Does Washington want war with Iran? Yes and no, I argue. On Brian Berletic’s citing of a 2009 Brookings Institute Report similar in its belligerent candour to the now infamous Rand Report of 2019, ⁴ I wrote:

Brian’s case – that (a) the USA does seek war with Iran and (b) used Hamas to that end – is impressive. All but irrefutable, I’d say, in its evidence assembled. So are all those other voices just plain wrong? Not necessarily. The Brookings Report, recall, is dated 2009. Since then huge weaknesses in US might have been exposed in Ukraine, while Yemeni disruption in the Red Sea affords a mild foretaste of what Iran – before we even get to its daunting defensive capability – might do in the Hormuz Strait. Also painting a very different global picture from that of 2009, the BRICS go from strength to strength, with the writing on the wall for dollar rule – not least by China fast reducing its US Treasury Bond holdings while Janet Yellen, in passive-aggressive mode, half pleads/half threatens Beijing over its too too successful economy. ⁵

In fact there’s a cautious consensus among sources I take seriously that while powerful Beltway voices on the Zionist Christian Right do advocate a strike on Iran – with Israel’s situation and leadership making it a hammer forged in heaven – they are not the most dominant voices.

For now. ⁶

But let’s not forget that WW3 is as likely to be triggered by accident, miscalculation and/or one round too many of nuclear chicken as by the conscious design even of Biblical Israel zealots.

My second read has to do with why China and Russia could not and would not stand idly by in the event of Iran under existential attack by Israel. Indeed, numerous sources – Forbes … Times of Israel … Foreign Policy … Moscow Times and others – report that Russia has this past week been delivering counter-offensive capability to Tehran. This likely means the formidable S400 SAM system, which in turn suggests, given how long it would take to train Iranian personnel, Russian forces already in Iran.

But my primary read on this question predates, also by four months, tensions in the wake of the Haniyeh assassination. Written by Will Schryver and dated April 13, it begins:

All for One and One for All

It is increasingly evident that Russia, China, and Iran recognize that an attack against any one of them would constitute an existential threat to them all. The strategic interests of all three countries are now inextricably intertwined …

Russia, China, and Iran have now formed a de facto  military and economic alliance — what they prefer to call a “partnership”.

In the case of Russia and China, a comprehensive full-spectrum partnership has emerged: military, economic, and monetary.

Trade between Russia and China has exploded both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Importantly, trade settlement is overwhelmingly denominated in rubles and renminbi. Use of the dollar and its international mechanisms is being aggressively deprecated.

Russia and China now conduct regular joint naval and air patrols of the western Pacific, from Alaska to the South China Sea.

Russia, China, and Iran conduct regular joint exercises in the Arabian Sea. Those exercises have increased in both scope and frequency in recent years.

Both Russia and China are investing vast sums of capital in Iran, much of it in the energy sector and in ambitious transportation projects aiming to construct fast and efficient trade corridors linking China, Iran, and Russia as primary nodes of Eurasian commerce.

Arms and technology transfers between the three countries have reached unprecedented levels.

Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov just concluded several days of talks with Chinese leaders, including both Wang Yi and Xi Jinping. In its report of the talks, the Chinese government’s flagship media organ, Global Times, summarized (in the words of prominent CPC commentator Li Haidong) the current state of the Russia/China relationship:

“China and Russia will not target any third party, but if hegemonic forces threaten China and Russia, or threaten world peace, China and Russia will stand together and fight to protect their own interests and safeguard world peace together.”

It is increasingly evident that Russia, China, and Iran recognize that an attack against any one of them would constitute an existential threat to them all. The strategic interests of all three countries are now inextricably intertwined …

So how close are we to WW3?

Terrifyingly.

* * *

1. The checks, balances and greater complexity of a multipolar world call for the diplomatic skills of a Metternich; skills lost to the US when the USSR imploded and Neocons saw a barn door opening on a New American Century; when Karl Rove could say “we make our own reality”, and Madeleine Albright that “we are the indispensable nation”. Such hubris is not conducive to diplomacy. It begets a boorish philistinism and groupThink othering – see Did the crazies capture the USA? How? – of all who speak to the wisdom of seeing the world, if only as devil’s advocates, the way one’s adversaries see it. What a different reality we might now be contemplating had Russia experts like the late Stephen Cohen, and ‘political realists’ like John Mearsheimer, been heeded over NATO expansion after 1989!
2. Two remarks. One, even in Cold War 1 at its iciest, US and Soviet leaders kept channels of communication open. The strutting infants posing as today’s US leaders have shut them down. Two, of several factors common to Ukraine and Israel, a glaring parallel is that of local leaders whose sole chance of personal and national survival is to widen their wars by drawing in direct US participation.
3. For further speculation, which is all anyone can offer here, on the escalation ladder Israel and Iran now climb, see this Naked Capitalism post of August 2 – Israel: Armageddon? I offer it as much for the fact that below-the-line standards at NC are unusually high for so voluminous a commentariat as for the fact that Yves Smith is always worth reading.
4. The 2019 Rand Report is cited extensively in my post of January 2022, Kazakhstan: why is the steppe on fire?
5. Since I wrote that April post, Japan, an even bigger holder than China, has been shedding US Treasury Bonds at a volume unprecedented. This, and what it might signify to a world already on the verge of recession, merits its own post.
6. My “for now” caveat is informed by the difficulty of countering ultra-hawk arguments that China, Russia and even Iran grow stronger by the day. Well might a John Bolton or Mike Pompeo echo the words of Macbeth: “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly”.