World War III is everywhere and
nowhere. Politicians and pundits predict it and warn about it as they’ve
been doing for 70 years. And for all of that time we’ve been fighting
World War III.
Is WWIII in Iran or Ukraine? Yes in its own way.
Is it in the confrontations in the South China Sea, the Hamas attack on
Israel or in the riots in the streets of our own cities? Also all yes.
Not to mention cartels smuggling drugs and foreign influence operations
being run in D.C.
And it’s in a thousand other incidents and
crises, some that make the news and some that don’t, but that are all
around us and others which have long become part of our history. It’s
all WWIII.
“I do not know with what weapons World War III will be
fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones,”
Einstein was quoted as saying. But Albert was as good at physics as he
was bad at politics and he had it the wrong way around. It’s WWIII
that‘s fought with stones.
The
atomic bomb, but not just it, had ended world wars as we knew them.
Even more decisively than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States had
conclusively demonstrated that nations with superior production
capacities combined with manpower and technological advancement will win
any world war. For the Soviet Union, a world war against the country
whose factories had supplied it with everything it needed to beat the
Nazi war machine was unthinkable.
Instead the Soviet Union
launched its own third world war fought not with atom bombs, but in some
cases with stones and sticks, but mostly a political war that depended
on spreading Communism, building third world alliances, and subverting
America from within. It won that war even as its politics and economics
imploded, finally leading to the fall of the Soviet Union.
While
the United States was the last man standing in the Cold War, after
paying a bloody price from Korea to Vietnam to the Middle East, it had
inherited a world order shaped by the USSR. America had built
multinational institutions, beginning with the United Nations, that had
been hijacked by what we, in less politically correct times, would have
called ‘subversives’.
Asia, Latin America and the Middle East
were dominated by socialist and nationalist movements that had been
allied with the Soviet Union and shaped by its Communist ideologies. All
that the fall of the USSR did was cut off some of the funding. It also
encouraged China to step into Russia’s place as a much more credible
peer rival to the United States and the West.
But it wasn’t China
that picked up the Soviet mantle: it was the Islamists, many of whom we
had nurtured as anti-Communists. From Iran to the Muslim Brotherhood,
they were the ones with a global vision, a knack for running secret
organizations and a murderous belief system that was just as compelling
to its adherents as Communism was to its acolytes earlier in the 20th
century.
While most people still think of WWIII as some grandiose
phenomenon in which nuclear weapons will rain from the sky leaving
behind a poisonous wasteland filled with lurching zombies, the real
world war was being fought before many of us were born. WWIII does look
like Ukraine, but it also looks like Vietnam and like Iran bombing the
Marine Barracks 40 years ago. And it’s also China stealing our
technological secrets and barraging us with propaganda.
WWIII is
small scale and deep. It’s compact proxy wars that fall short of a
nuclear exchange. It’s information warfare that exploits our weaknesses.
and It’s ideological, economic and social. Instead of nuclear
explosions, it’s narrow territorial conflicts, it’s influencers on
social media spreading lies and it’s hacking attacks. It’s death by a
thousand cuts rather than one big smash.
The winners and losers
of the first two world wars were conditioned by their history to think
of a world war as something apocalyptic, but WWIII as it is now is being
fought by nations and movements that were on the sidelines or bit
players in those conflicts, but who have absorbed the post-war
strategies of those wars that terrorism, guerrilla warfare, influence
campaigns, economic warfare and limited hostilities are better tools of
ju-jitsu against great powers.
The WWIII that so many imagined
never came because we were the victims of our own success. With or
without nuclear weapons, no one wanted to fight an unrestricted global
war against us so they found ways to undermine us, to tie us down and
small wars to drag us into. They focused on undermining our morale,
fracturing our society, turning our youth against us, corrupting our
morals, buying out our economy and invading us through immigration.
While
we still keep waiting for a big war to begin, our enemies have been
winning it. World War III is here and we’re losing it because we don’t
see what’s going on around us as a war.
And so we never really fight back.
A
world war plays to our strengths and our enemies, from the Soviet
Communists of the Cold War to the Chinese Communists of today, from the
local and international Marxist and Islamist coalitions, prefer to
exploit our weaknesses. We may have the strongest army, but the worst
internal security. There is nothing stopping foreign enemies from
robbing us, ripping us off or just walking across the border. We hate
the idea of war so we bribe our enemies to leave us alone, to return our
citizens that they have taken hostage, and to win their hearts and
minds.
Why try to tangle with an Abrams tank or an A-10 when you
can bribe our politicians, corrupt our universities and fund terrorist
groups to attack us around the world. That’s the real WWIII.
Americans
have a weakness of thinking that history begins and ends, that it
explodes outward in world-changing events, when history is just a record
of the things going on around us. The world wars were not abrupt
cataclysms that divided the past and the future, they were extensions of
events that had been underway. War has a way of marking periods in
time, but the absence of great wars is not an absence of history: it
just means that they are being fought by other means.
Our
unhealthy obsession with World War III has all too often blinded us to
what is going on around us. We did not take Islamic terrorism seriously
because our enemies seemed too small and backward. And we only view
small wars in terms of their risk of exploding into big wars as if the
only wars that really matter are the ones that might lead to the ‘Big
One’.
Instead of fighting a war as we imagine it to be, we need to be ready to win the ones we’re in.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.
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