How close are we to World War Three? Tit-for-tat works until Iran has bomb

Protestors hold photos of Ismail Haniyeh, a senior Hamas leader who was assassinated in Iran on Wednesday, at a square in Tehran. Picture: Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

There have in modern times been moments of nail-biting tension, such as the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and of anger too, when in 1968 the Vietnam War radicalised the young across the West.

But there has rarely been such a cluster of flashpoints as in 2024, with bloody unfolding wars in both the Middle East and eastern Europe; a year of coups, massacres and assassination attempts; the blatant manipulation of elections by crooked autocrats such as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro; and the rise and rise of the far right.

Whether this will end up as the year in which a third world war started is another matter. There are still too many uncertainties: about the spillover from the present conflicts, about the quality of leadership after the US elections in November, about the coarsening of political culture and the malign intent of authoritarians, about a just-around-the-corner surge in nuclear proliferation, about the possible collapse of nation states.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators at a rally protesting the death of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Picture: Kemal Aslan/AFP

Fair to say that it is already the Year of Living Dangerously. So much so that the assassination attempt on Donald Trump lost its shock value in double-quick time and within the week had ceased to be a talking point, except as a reason to look more carefully at the sloppiness of the US Secret Service.

In 1968, by comparison, the fatal shooting of Robert Kennedy - poised to become the Democratic candidate for president (and tread in the footsteps of his assassinated older brother, JFK) - horrified the nation. The shooter was depicted as a deranged Palestinian but his cause was given little attention. Instead it seemed that Kennedy had been martyred for the young Americans who had been deployed to Vietnam in large numbers (2.6 million). The outrage became a collective howl. The same year, Soviet Union-led forces invaded Czechoslovakia to crush a reformist uprising. Pleas for help from the West were ignored. As in a Polish crackdown in March 1968, the West kept out of the fray, respecting the Kremlin’s “sphere of influence”.

Robert F. Kennedy and his brother President John F. Kennedy.

That’s how a third world war was avoided in the past: looking away when hostile powers performed unacceptable acts.

After the Cuban missile crisis was settled with some brinkmanship, it was agreed the Kremlin would drop its plan for expanding missile bases on the island, in return for a US promise not to invade it and to remove missiles from Turkey. But the long postscript to that deal was that neither side would rattle the nuclear sabre again.

That changed with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. After suffering reverses on the battlefield, President Putin was soon making threats to Nato allies about the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. The West dismissed these as unserious yet even talking about nuclear exchange has raised the temperature.

Indeed, nuclear threats are becoming the norm. Kim Jong-un threatens the US and South Korea that they will pay a “horrendous price” if they try to inhibit his nuclear programme. The likely result: if North Korea shows signs of invading the South, the US will remind Kim and his patrons in Beijing that the South Koreans will be protected by the American nuclear umbrella. That, at any rate, has been the tone of the Biden administration. Whether a Trump administration has a similar view on umbrellas remains to be seen.

The world has changed since the 1960s, becoming more complex and more dangerous. Since the Cuban crisis the number of nuclear powers has risen to include China, India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan. With Iran hovering on the brink of nuclear breakthrough, rivals such as Saudi Arabia are edging closer.

In 2002 the supposedly reformist President Rafsanjani of Iran called Israel a “one-bomb” country - that is, that a single Iranian nuclear bomb would be enough to wipe out the “Zionist entity”. Now a new so-called reformist president is in power, and he has just been humiliated by the elimination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Fuad Shukr in Beirut. The message from Israel is that Iran can no longer protect its proxy chieftains. But it is just that: a message, not a slap of the gauntlet.

Jane Fonda speaking at an anti Vietnam war rally.

In 2002 the supposedly reformist President Rafsanjani of Iran called Israel a “one-bomb” country. Picture: AP

This is the playbook that is being used in the Middle East. It’s a tit-for-tat etiquette that seeks to control movement up the escalation ladder. But it only works for as long as Iran doesn’t possess a nuclear bomb. Then the stakes get higher. Similarly, President Biden has tried to use a kind of meta-language with President Putin, providing weapons to Ukraine with ever-greater relaxations on how far they can be used against Russia itself.

For now, the guard rails of international relations, forged in the 1960s, are holding. But the collective memory of how close the world came to disaster in that decade is fading, with potentially dire consequences for us all.

The Times