World War III

I wonder if future historians will look back on this time and refer to it as World War III. It’s a sobering thought, and ironically, one that makes me want to go get drunk.

After all, isn’t pretty much every country in the world already at war? Even Australia and New Zealand have soldiers deployed in the Middle East; even “neutral” Switzerland has soldiers stationed in hotspots around the globe.

I’m not sure what else is needed for historians to qualify today’s situation as what old newsreels referred to (in that godlike newscaster voice) as “world at war.” Maybe just new newsreels referring to it that way.

Perhaps, though, we want to avoid naming what’s going on today as the third world war. Perhaps to do so would empower it; perhaps the proper strategy is to poo-poo current global conflicts; as long as we don’t admit we’re in WWIII, then we won’t be.

I always used to think that people in the 1920s and 30s who referred to WWI as “the war to end all wars” were horribly naïve; I thought they must have been very embarrassed when WWII came along and proved them so wrong.

But all my life, I’ve been pretty much led to believe that WWII was the final global war; people in the latter half of the 20th century were simply too sophisticated and interdependent to wage a worldwide armed struggle. But that’s been proven wrong time and again; if anything, we’re less sophisticated and more polarized than the people who stumbled and slid into the first two world wars.

Sci-fi movies set in the future typically make reference to the third world war; usually it’s remembered as having ended in nuclear holocaust. I suppose that’s what it would really take for historians to qualify today’s conflicts as World War III; on the other hand, if nuclear holocaust is the criterion, then there probably won’t be any historians around to do the qualifying.