marcos said that ww3 already happened, but the developed countries called it the "cold war" because it didn't happen to them. it happened to the developing countries that lost millions of lives to violence and destruction.

he also said the 4th world war started almost immediately after the soviet collapse.

https://mondediplo.com/1997/09/marcos

i bring it up because that framing has plagued my thoughts ever since.

I would make the argument that WW3 has basically been happening since 9/11/01

Just a constant series of military conflicts that coincidentally allow the USA to incroach upon other nations and strongarm its allies into supporting these campaigns

As for Iran declaring war on the USA, the USA declared war on Iran when they bombed their nuclear facilities

I think we're clearly in an interwar period right now, which is to say that we're in the prelude.

The Ukraine war is drawing down and I suspect that it will be about 12-24 months before we see a conclusion.
(Predictions: Russia takes Odessa and there's a new Novorossiya that connects from Transnistria through Odessa, Crimea, and the Donbas. Zelensky's government buckles and he flees under corruption charges. Ukraine exists as a landlocked rump state.)

The US is publicly signalling retreat from its role as global hegemon. It's still going to fuck around in West Asia for obvious reasons but it feels like NATO is going to be palmed off to a very economically weak EU for the most part. I expect that we're seeing the US withdraw to a Monroe Doctrine era for the most part.

With that said, I have a very bad feeling particularly about Iraq. It's going to be interesting to see how many fronts the US empire can maintain and which are deemed in its priorities. Venezuela is likely going to be more than the US can handle and, should Russia come through with its promises for military support if the US continues to escalate then I don't see an open war on Venezuela being maintained for long.

The DPRK is largely safe, unless the Republic of Chaebols starts acting up again and reignites the Korean war (as happened not so long ago, which was an incredibly close near miss.)

I suspect that the US top brass are aware that the window for a limited naval conflict in the South China Sea to clip the wings of the Chinese economy has closed. Either it would need to kick off today, which is unlikely as there hasn't been enough consent manufactured for it, and even then it would be a coin flip if it would actually pan out in the US favor or if it's basically too late for it already.

The US will continue its fuckery with Taiwan but I see that as being likely to draw down as Chinese economic counterwarfare hits the US hard (have fun running a military industrial complex without access to synthetic diamonds, suckers - it'd be a real shame if you were technically able to produce your own but your entire economy is reliant upon an AI bubble that requires dizzying amounts of electricity under an already overtaxed electrical infrastructure and the production of synthetic diamonds is another hugely energy-intensive industry.)

The prize has been Iran for a long time. My concerns are that the US is signalling that they plan to Syrian Civil War Iraq (again) to activate Wahhabi militias (technically they're already doing so in Iraq, but that's a long story.) So that would look like refusing to recognize the newly elected Iraqi prime minister when the elections come or backing an Iraqi Juan Guaido to create a North Vietnam/South Vietnam kinda situation. This will be used as a stepping stone for bringing war right to the border of Iran and attempting to lure them into the fray. Obviously Wahhabi proxies will attempt incursions over the Iran-Iraq border.

This comes at a time when Iran faces a catastrophic drought so the timeline on this is likely going to be very rapid if it unfolds this way and it will be contingent on drought management and how bad the drought turns out to be but we've seen how droughts affect the political stability of the region via the recent history of the Arab Spring.

I genuinely don't see the US being capable of a ground war in Iran unless they achieve air superiority. I'm not sure where Iranian air defences are at right now, post the recent strikes on Iran, but they have responded and they have been gearing up for it. Their hypersonics in particular mean that they will be able to pummel a beleaguered Israel and there's a decent chance that making Israel scream would be equivalent deterrence to giving the US itself a bloody nose. Hard to tell whether it would be enough to get them both to back off or whether it would draw out more attacks, and it would depend on how effective Iranian air defences are and especially how effective their missile strikes are - I suspect that Russia will transfer their hypersonic technology to Iran if there's enough time and that would likely make their missiles more deadly, although I'm no expert in military stuff so I'm spitballing on that part.

If there's an open war on Iran we will see a regional conflict plus the US. I don't think that current US partners will be very willing to participate much - the EU is focused on Ukraine/Russia and they can't afford to scale up their own military capacity, let alone take the lead on NATO, let alone getting dragged into a conflict with Iran. Canada and Australia are both struggling economically and they'll go along with it but the political situation in both countries is such that people will get really pissed off if hundreds of billions of their dollars go towards supporting Trump's military adventurism in West Asia so I'd expect both to mostly provide support and special forces without doing much in terms of committing an actual fighting force.

So it will be interesting to see what happens.

DPRK? Probably very secure.

Russia-Ukraine? Drawing down, unlikely to flare up much except for a potential run on Kiev and a last-ditch effort to repel Russia or to hold on to whatever territory before a peace agreement or the total collapse of Ukraine.

The EU is sidelined and western Europe is relegated to becoming a backwater (and that's without the ripple effect of the AI bubble popping) so count them as being largely sidelined.

Venezuela is going to be interesting but I think there's a reasonable likelihood that the US isn't going to be capable of maintaining a front there for long.

Africa is Africa, so it's going to be the punching bag of neocolonial countries as much as they're able to get away with it. Hard to tell if any big wars are likely to break out, but Somalia and Burkina Faso (or allied countries nearby) are the likely candidates.

Taiwan has lost their footing in regards to strategic importance with semiconductors, but this will take 5-10 years for the effects to really be seen. I foresee the US backing away from Taiwan due to military and especially economic reasons as reunification becomes an inevitability that the US can no longer stifle.

China's a wildcard here. I'd say it's becoming increasingly unlikely that the US will start a war with China except if there's a huge economic or political collapse (😬) and they choose to shift to a war economy and Trump wants to maintain a state of exception by starting an open war with China, although there's a good chance that Chinese missiles and drones would sink the US carriers in short order which would make it unviable for the US to maintain a war on China for very long.

Ansarallah in Yemen will be fairly secure.

Iraq and Iran will be the ones to watch. Hard to tell exactly which path to war the US will take and what timeframe it will unfold by. A war on China necessitates the US drawing down on a war on Iran though - either is likely to be the US biting off more than it can chew but both at the same time?? Lol good luck.

That's not to say that we won't see red lines being crossed or lots of countries being dragged into an expanding conflict but I foresee the highest likelihood of a regional conflict in West Asia between Iran, Ansarallah, Hezbollah, and Hamas on one side and the US, Israel, US puppet states in the region, and Wahhabi insurgent forces on the other side. This could be a briefer conflict than you might imagine.

Unless the US starts truly collapsing and then the everything is up in the air and we could see WWIII, the US starting a war to expand its borders (likely in South America), or a war with China.

I'm giving WWIII a forecast of having a 25% chance for the immediate future in the coming 5 years. Remember to ping me to heckle me when my assessment proves to be woefully incorrect.

You are probably referring to the recent statements of Masoud Pezeshkian.

I consider them to be mostly political rhetoric, nothing has really changed. Iran has been in a hybrid war with NATO and Israel pretty much since the islamic revolution. This conflict does flare up every now and then, for example in June of this year, or at the beginning of 2020. So far though, it never turned into a total war, and I don't see why it would be different this time.

When russia crossed into ukraine there was "WW3 sign up list" graffiti in every construction site bathroom.

Random people IRL don't know what's going on

Direct wars between coalitions of the largest industrial powers can't happen anymore. They all have nukes now, everyone would die before the actual war part started. And besides, these wars were a product of a multipolar political system, which we don't currently have. We're in a monopolar system that's turning into a bipolar one. So the closer model would be Cold War 2.

Of course China's foreign policy is very different from the Soviet Union's, so I don't think it'll look like a series of wars between a US proxy and a Chinese proxy. If I had to guess, I'd say wars between US proxies and non-state organizations receiving material aid from nearby countries which in turn all happen to have strong economic ties with China.

As always, it doesn't matter if a war is a "world war" to the people who live near it. Even a "small" war is a world-ending disaster for anyone near the front lines, regardless of this international political theory stuff.

you won't see a mass mobilization until the memory of WW2 and vietnam are fully relegated to textbooks and half remembered stories from long dead relatives.

open war decs are very unpopular, and the average person in the west (currently) knows enough about geopolitics to realize we tend to only punch down. They're also expensive. Mobilization is insanely costly.

War with big moving frontlines and big troop dedications is just something you're unlikely to see unless the situation on the world stage changes in a hurry.

so much easier to use proxies and assassinations and spec ops bullshit to terrorize and weaken a nation than expend resources destroying and occupying it. There's a very loud asymmetry in the ability of nations to power project. Where the US can drop a psycho squad anywhere in the world, kill whoever they like most of the time - what's the point of a big war?

part of the revolutionary grievances for the american revolution was that the crown would dismiss judges and governors for not enforcing the crown's will, right?

well i mean, we learned from the "best" i guess - because nowadays stepping out of line gets some psycho with DID and a boner for sticking his knife in people and canoeing heads. Minimal dollars spent, the problem fixes itself as the next guy to step up realizes there's fucking nothing they can do to stop it from happening again.

This method is cheaper even with MIC grift

though the existential nature of the "war on terror" was largely fabricated, the idea of using terror and asymmetrical warfare was turned around and made into a method to more cheaply manage foreign matters, and now that nobody standing with any power gives a shit, those techniques are coming home more than they ever have (even though they've been here the entire time in their own way, the neocolonial operations are still coming home in a way they really havent)

there won't be ww3 because there aren't even nationalist porkies (only temporarily embarrassed national porkies) , everyone will just surrender to usa sooner or later.

If it does, can it wait until next Monday? I have plans this weekend.

Where did you hear that?