Since the US and Israel launched a joint attack on Iran last week, killing 165 schoolgirls and staff at a primary school, the country’s leader, Ali Khamenei, and countless others on the first day alone, social media has been awash with jokes about World War 3. Along with more entrepreneurial types hawking essential items we’ll apparently need in the nuclear apocalypse, people are posting WW3 outfit inspo and making complaints about the fact that they still have to sign into their morning Teams meeting.

If you’re experiencing this war primarily through your phone screen, it’s more than a little glib to reduce the suffering and deaths of other people into jokes about how anxiety-inducing it is for you. But at the same time, there is plenty to be anxious about. The human cost for people in the region has already been catastrophic. The death toll has now surpassed 1000 in Iran, 123 in Lebanon, and 111 in Israel. Six US soldiers have also been reported dead (although there’s speculation that the real figure is higher). Almost the entire region is ablaze, with Iran attacking Gulf states with US bases, including Dubai, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and anti-US protests breaking out in Iraq and Pakistan, where at least 22 people were killed after security forces opened fire. For the time being, a ceasefire is off the table.

So, annoying memes and TikTok grifters aside, are we actually looking at World War 3? The short answer is probably not, but it’s complicated. At the very least, the US and Israel have guaranteed that the world will be a more dangerous and volatile place in the months, years and possibly decades to come. Below, we unpack the likelihood of global war.

WHY YOU SHOULDN’T PANIC

Some experts believe that we are already in WW3, and that it’s just taken a different form this time round: less head-on confrontation and more proxy conflicts, economic warfare and cyber attacks. But when most people hear the phrase, they’re probably thinking about a traditional military conflict with major powers lining up on either side. In this case, that would mean Russia or China (or both) getting involved, and so far there’s no indication that this is going to happen. 

However, China and Russia are allies of Iran, and they have both called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council and denounced the assassination of Khamenei. Iran is also using Russian and Chinese satellites. But in the last week and more generally, neither state has shown any willingness to engage in a direct military confrontation with the US. In fact, both have strong incentives to keep Trump on side: Russia is relying on his support for a favourable settlement to the war in Ukraine; China is keen to end the trade war, carried out over the years and by successive US presidents, which has strained its economy. 

Writing in Foreign Affairs, foreign policy analyst Yun Sun acknowledges that the longer the war goes on, the greater the pressure there will be on China to support Iran (providing supplies like drones, for example), but this would still stop short of a full-scale military intervention. As it stands, neither country looks set to take more decisive action. In fact, Russia stands to benefit more than any other nation from the war, which will send the price of oil skyrocketing and increase its power as an energy supplier, at a time when its wartime economy is stagnating. So other than the Houthis, who have yet to jump in, it's at this stage unlikely that anyone else is going to take military action against the US.

The second thing that usually comes to mind when we talk about WW3 is the prospect of nuclear annihilation. Over the past fortnight, lots of people in the US, in particular, have been worried about the prospect of an incoming strike. But Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons (if it did, the US and Israel almost certainly wouldn’t have attacked – notice that no one has ever tried it on with North Korea). Khamenei actually issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons, and while Iran does have nuclear facilities, which it insists are for civilian purposes only, these were attacked by a joint US-Israel operation last summer.

How much damage this actually caused remains unclear, but Trump himself boasted at the time that the facilities were “obliterated”. He’s now changed his story, so take that claim with a pinch of salt, but not even the most ardent Western supporters of the war claim that Iran possesses nuclear weapons. Unless Russia or China step in, we’re probably not on the imminent brink of the apocalypse (touch wood!) and civilians in the US – far beyond the range of Iran’s missiles – don’t need to worry about immediate retaliation. Of course, now that Khamenei is out of the way, his successor might not be quite so reluctant to enrich that uranium.

... AND WHY YOU SHOULD

Obviously, it is cause for alarm that the world’s leading power is a rogue state led by reckless, warmongering psychopaths, many of whom are also deeply stupid (it’s true the US has never been bound by international law, but the fact it’s no longer even pretending is still a disturbing direction of travel). Except for Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, no Western leader is willing to acknowledge this reality, much less do anything about it.

And while social media posts about living through the apocalypse might be self-indulgent, there are plenty of powerful figures in the US who are determined to bring about exactly that outcome. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has just reported 200 complaints of senior figures justifying the war with rhetoric about “the end times” and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. On a similar note, Mike Huckabee, the US Ambassador to Israel, recently suggested that Israel has the God-given right to take over more or less the entire Middle East and “it would be fine if they took it all”. When religious extremists like this, in both Israel and the US, are within spitting distance of the nuclear codes, talking about the end times doesn’t seem quite so absurd. 

In terms of the international impact the war might have, we might learn from the example of Iraq, which destabilised the MENA region and led quite directly to the formation of groups like ISIS, and by extension, every related terrorist attack carried out over the last two decades. The kind of destabilisation which occurred in Iraq, Syria and Libya (where Western intervention led to the emergence of open-air slave markets, among other atrocities too countless to list) is essentially Israel’s ideal outcome in Iran – not so much regime change but total state collapse. Perhaps to that end, Israel and the US are attacking civilian institutions, like hospitals, health facilities and police stations,  along with military targets.

As Danny Citrinowicz, Iran expert and senior researcher at Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies, told the Financial Times yesterday, “If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future . . . [or] the stability of Iran.” The Iranian government currently looks more resilient than the Trump administration had anticipated – they really seemed to think the war would be over in a matter of days. But if the Iranian state does collapse, there will inevitably be blowback beyond its borders, along with the disastrous effects on its civilian population. And looking at the events of the past fortnight, any state with an adversarial relationship to the US might now reasonably conclude that it’s a good idea to acquire nuclear weapons as soon as possible. 

In the short term, the war in Iran could lead to civil unrest across the world and particularly in Europe. After Iran has warned vessels not to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow sea passage through which 20 per cent of the world’s energy supplies have to navigate, there has already been a sharp spike in the price of oil (the US, as the world’s largest oil exporter, will, for the most part, be insulated from these effects.) According to some estimates, energy bills could rise by as much as £160 per year in Britain, fuel for motorists could become much more expensive, and there may be knock-on effects on the price of food. A large percentage of the world's fertiliser supplies also pass through the Strait of Hormuz, which could also severely strain global agricultural production – this is where US consumers are more likely to feel the sting.

High gas prices, along with spikes in the cost-of-living more generally, are the most common predictors of riots, even when they’re sparked by something unrelated. Considering the UK’s recent history of racist pogroms, and the general atmosphere of anger and volatility across Europe and in the US, the coming year could be very bleak. Maybe you should be allowed to skip that Teams meeting after all.