It comes down to terms.
Like here in the US many historians could argue that the Civil War of 1861-1865 was actually America’s 3rd Civil War since the American revolution, fought mostly between those for and again British rule was the first, and Whiskey rebellion of 1791 being the second.
Context is rather important though, eh? Otherwise I could be similarly dismissive of the two world wars, by saying more people have died of heart disease.
An attack, during peacetime, in the middle of NYC, killing thousands of innocents in spectacular fashion is not something to be taken lightly.
No, it’s not WWIII. And it doesn’t justify any foreign policy. But you can’t imply any other nation would have just shrugged and got on with it.
To answer the OP in a word: No. I compare 9/11 to termites causing an addition to your house to fall down. You may have had no idea they were there and getting rid of the little buggers could take a lot of time and expense, but for the most part it was of little consequence. By comparison, WW II would have been like a fire that took out half the neighborhood.
9/11 is the most overrated historical event in the history of mankind. In the US, it has become the Day Of Perpetual Recreational Grieving. For the families of the victims, sure it was a horrific tragedy. For the rest of us, it was just a wake up call that we had a problem that needed to be addressed. Has what followed been World War III? I don’t think so.
Sort of like Pearl Harbor or the sinking of the Lusitania?
IMHO, what distinguished previous World Wars, including pre-20th Century conflicts like the Napoleonic Wars and the French and Indian War/Seven Years’ War was not necessarily the death toll, but the fact that they involved nearly all the major powers of their day in a global conflict that represented a struggle between civilizations and ultimately changed the political and economic face of the world.
So in a sense, the Cold War was a long, slow simmering World War III between the democratic West and the communist Soviet Block. Fortunately that war was fought mostly through a series of smaller scale conflicts between proxy states and never utilized the full destructive potential of both powers. And that conflict was ultimately resolved with the symbolic dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR as a political entity.
So the conflicts in the Middle East could be interpreted by future historians as World War IV. It has become a global conflict of modern industrialized nations (mostly the West and Russia) against Islamic Fundamentalism. The roots of which having started at the creation of Israel after WWII and with 9/11 being the “Pearl Harbor” / “Lusitania” event that galvanized the world to action.
I suspect that this conflict will last decades and will ultimately transform the Middle East as we know it.
I also predict World War V will center around Africa.
This conflict HAS lasted decades. It’s older than I am. It starts at least as early as 1948.
But wars have always happened, we just don’t remember most of them. What distinguished the World Wars was that they were full scale industrialized wars of unprecedented destruction that changed the direction of the countries that more or less ran the world. That’s not true of the Middle Eastern conflicts, really. This is unlikely to cause the world’s great powers to fall apart. Iraq is barely a country and in a few centuries will be as historically noteworthy as, say, the Kingdom of Burgundy.
I was meaning more in the context of air raids killing a bunch of civilians in one night, but even with your examples, I doubt they were really being nearly so dramatic about Pearl Harbor in 1954, or about the Lusitania in 1928 as they are about 9/11 in 2014.
It’s unfortunate that 9/11 had to be the casus belli event, because there were plenty of preliminary plots that got little notice (1993 WTC bombing, USS Cole bombing, 2000 millenium plots, 1998 embassy bombings, etc…) from people in or out of the government.
But yeah, I agree with your WWIII/WWIV concept, except that I doubt they’ll really be called those things- they’ll likely end up called something like “the Cold War between the US and USSR” and the “Western War on Islamic Terrorism” or something like that.
To get the official “World War” name, it would likely have to be something involving declared wars by most, if not all major powers in the world.
If this is not too much of a hijack, I’d like to ask why you think this will be the case.
So … Why Africa?
I’d think fighting over water, as UDS posited upthread, would be much more likely, and Africa doesn’t have an abundance of that.
Is it because of the minerals underground?
This probably won’t be regarded as a WW as it is now but things could get interesting (or horrible in fact) depending on different circumstances. I personally don’t believe that all of the participants have to be nation states but, if ISIS’ efforts spreads into Turkey; if Russia gets involved down the road; or if opponents of ISIS aren’t effective enough, this could spread and last a long, long time. A WW? Who knows.
Non-nuclear. Consider something like this. The US is invaded, we’re on the verge of losing our government, our way of life, our holdings, all of it. We have 20 nuclear ballistic missile submarines off the coast of the countries who invaded us. Do you think this will remain non-nuclear for very long?
Now, factor the same scenario in to the other members of the nuclear club. Will they push the button when their way of life is threatened?
Non-nuclear? I don’t think the loser would allow that to happen, regardless.
Just my opinion.
The Cold War never ended. Nearly every conflict and global event has been a result of the ongoing cold war between the United States and Russia.
When do we let the people who live in the ME decide what the countries are called, and where the boundary lines are drawn?
The US could remove Israel’s nukes but tell the (various) Muslims: The Jews stay in Jan 1967 borders - let your grandkids deal with it (or some generation by which time we will no longer give a rat’s ass about Great God OIL).
The geopolitical wisdom of the Dope. Since 1973.
Definitely not WWIII. I suppose it’s possible for it to escalate to that point. Maybe Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear facilities, ISIS spills into Turkey and draws NATO in, and Russia gets blatantly caught supporting anti-NATO forces, says “fuck it, we’re overt now” and invades the Baltics.
ISIS, Al Qaeda, etc. are never in themselves going to be a serious threat to the world order. You need to be an industrialized developed (or at least semideveloped) country to be a military power, and the Al Qaeda/ISIS creed (unlike some other varieties of Islam, or for that matter unlike communism, or fascism) is hostile to the kind of scientific and technical education that’s needed for industrialization.
Malaysia is a semi-industrialized country that’s both economically successful and religiously conservative (and becoming more so), so if ISIS moderated its views, took over a number of countries and built them into countries at the level of Malaysia they might be more of a threat, but they aren’t. Their own ideology is strictly self-limiting.
I’m a lot more worried about American military-hawk yahoos provoking a war with Russia than I am about ISIS.
Nice summary.