I remember learning in school that the flashpoint for World War I was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Like most people, I never quite understood how the first-ever World War, involving over 30 nations and leading to almost 20 million deaths, resulted from a gratuitous murder by a handful of radical students. Apparently universities should keep a very close eye on student organizations!
I later encountered the realist school of geopolitics, which argues that the Great War was a disaster waiting to happen. The actual cause of the war, according to realists, was not a random assassination, but the rise of German (and to a lesser extent Russian and American) economic and military power, which threatened the then-British-dominated world order.
Realists say this pattern is not uncommon. A number one power, alarmed at the rise of a number two challenger, allies itself with the number three power, but ultimately fails to maintain its position. The shifting power dynamics, in which the number one power no longer has the economic and military might to back up its top ranking, produces a major war, whose aftermath establishes the new international pecking order. In the case of the two World Wars, which were really one war with two major episodes, the thalassocratic British empire exhausted itself fighting Germany, allowing the US to seize the number one spot.
Today, the US empire is in a position not unlike Britain’s circa 1914. Having industrialized first, built a huge navy, and developed the necessary skills to “rule the waves” and colonize the wogs, the Brits had benefitted from a huge head start; but by 1914 the Germans, Russians, and Americans were catching up, and the Brits no longer had enough relative power to enforce unipolar world domination.
Likewise, 2024 America is still coasting on the fumes of its gigantic post-World War II head start on the rest of the world. The US emerged from World War II with roughly 50% of global GDP. In 1960 it was still 40%. But the decline since then has been steady. Today the US only controls 13% of global GDP. But it still imagines itself as the global Goliath it was in 1960—or maybe even bigger, since the Soviet ideological challenger has disappeared, and the grandiosely narcissistic neocons have seized the helm of the ship of state.
A major war that will reset power relations and take the US down several notches seems almost inevitable.* The question remains, where will the flashpoint be?
The neocons, in their infinite wisdom, have made it difficult to guess, having alienated so much of the world that the coming take-down-the-US World War could break out practically anywhere. Russia and its borderlands…China and its southern sea and/or its errant province of Taiwan… and now, with the genocide of Palestine making the Islamic world even angrier than Russia and China, the whole middle belt of Eurasia and North Africa is equally hostile territory.
But before we start globetrotting in search of flashpoints, why not begin imagining the transforming event a bit closer to home? If the assassination of heir-presumptive Archduke Ferdinand, attributed to allegedly state-supported radical fanatics, could set off World War I, could an assassination of presumptive 2024 president Donald Trump, attributed to radical Iran-supported fanatics, unleash World War III?
Flashpoint Florida
Imagine: It’s October 2024. Trump is leading in the polls 55%-45% nationwide, with a clear edge in all the swing states. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a drone swoops down on Mar-a-Lago, smashes through a plate glass window like a supermosquito on steroids, and stings Trump with its explosive charge just as he’s breaking open his seventh can of diet coke. (Cinematographically, we cut from a close-up of the pssssssst as Trump opens the can to a medium shot of the almost simultaneous explosion.)
Fortunately, almost before what is left of Trump is declared dead, the media tells us who did it. A radical Iranian-Palestinian terrorist named Lee Harvey Atta is arrested on the seventh floor of the Palm Beach School Book Depository and accidentally defenestrated before he can be questioned. Luckily, on the floor of the book storeroom, authorities discover an Iranian-made Manlicher-Carcano drone control rig complete with instructions written in Farsi, signed by the Supreme Leader of Iran.
President Biden, whose cognition has been revived to functionality thanks to an Elon Musk (TM) brain implant, appears on television extravagantly praising the late and much-lamented Trump, canceling the election, declaring that all Americans are united in their thirst for vengeance, and calling for an all-out war on Iran to be personally commanded by a certain Bibi Netanyahu, who will be Lear-Jetted and then helicoptered in from Tel Aviv to take charge in the White House Situation Room. With the mutterings of conspiracy theorists silenced by the new AI-driven censorship algorithms, the US and the world are off to the races.
Other Potential Flashpoints
The above scenario, or some only slightly-less-ludicrous variation, may not be quite as unlikely as it sounds. Removing Trump, inciting Trump supporters to war hysteria, and blaming Iran—a plausible patsy given its stated desire for revenge for the assassination of General Soleimani—would kill three birds with one drone. The neocons may even have thought ahead to such a scenario when they conned Trump into approving the murder of Gen. Soleimani.
But don’t bet on Flashpoint Florida. It’s a big world out there, and—thanks to the neocons—most of it hates the US empire with a passion. The list of war-trigger possibilities is so long that guessing right would be like winning the lottery.
US ships are sitting ducks due to the proliferation of advanced anti-ship missiles. Instead of the long-awaited Persian Gulf of Tonkin incident, one iteration of which was thwarted in 2007 by US 5th Fleet advisor Gwenyth Todd, we could see a Red Sea Gulf of Tonkin incident… only it might involve an actual attack, albeit a false flag one, as in “remember the Maine.”
As the above examples suggest, there are many ways that the continuing Israeli genocide of Palestine could indirectly lead to World War III. But could Palestine become a direct flashpoint? The Palestinians don’t seem to have enough military power. But if the war goes badly enough for the Palestinian Resistance, other branches of the Axis of Resistance will escalate their support, with unpredictable consequences. Additionally, there is massive covert support for Palestine among wealthy and powerful elements of regional nations, in some cases among high-ranking members of the state apparatus who wouldn’t be caught dead—or rather would be caught dead—if they uttered their real feelings about the Zionists in public.
One nightmarish potential flashpoint is the specter of a no-return-address WMD attack on Israel. The technology of WMD—micronukes, bioweapons, and the like—has been advancing since the days of the Davy Crockett backpack nukes of the 1950s, and even since the US-developed COVID bioweapon attack on China and Iran of a few years ago (which turned out to be a pretty good proof-of-concept for deniable, no-return-address bioattacks in general). Anger at Israel, in light of the current genocide, has reached the point that it’s virtually inevitable that people will try such things within the next few decades, assuming Israel is still around, and barring unforeseen changes in Zionist behavior.
Flashpoint Ukraine
Zionist fanatics on the wrong side of history have made Palestine and its region a potential WW3 flashpoint. Likewise Ukrainian nationalist fanatics, also on the wrong side of history, have created a parallel danger.
Just as 10 million Zionist Jews cannot defeat two billion Muslims, 40 million Ukrainians cannot defeat 140 million Russians. But the fanatics insist on trying. They know that their only hope is to drag the US into their war in an ever-bigger way. The result would be the destruction of the US empire, which, as mentioned at the beginning of the article, is grossly overextended given its 13%-and-shrinking share of global GDP.
Though we didn’t talk about Taiwan in the latest FFWN broadcast, it’s clear that the anti-China faction of neocons is trying to turn Taiwan into China’s Ukraine, by stoking the forces of fanatical Chinese nationalism and trying to goad Beijing into direct hostilities. If they succeed, World War III could start in the “cleanest” possible way: An immediate, direct war between the sinking #1 power and the rising #2 power.
Other Flashpoints?
This brief discussion certainly doesn’t exhaust the list of potential WW3 flashpoints. I’m sure my readers can think of others.
*At least if you are a realist. Since I am an idealist, accepting as I do the arguments of Bernardo Kastrup and the Holy Qur’an, not necessarily in that order, I reserve the right to believe that with God’s help we can avert World War III.
By Bjorn Hilt | International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War | December 8, 2015
Besides the terrible effects of the burst of light that causes eye damage, the heat that sets everything flammable on fire, the electromagnetic pulse that knocks out all electronic devices, and the blast that produces winds with ten times the force of a hurricane, demolishing everything, the detonation of nuclear weapons also leads to the emission of large amounts of ionizing radiation, which has serious deleterious effects on humans and many other species. Ionizing radiation is, in fact, a lurking danger as we cannot see it, we cannot smell it, we cannot hear it, and we cannot feel it immediately. But we certainly get harmed from it.
To reduce exposure to ionizing radiation and the risk of deleterious effects, we doctors usually warn our patients against having frequent examinations or procedures that involve x-rays. That is because x-rays are ionizing radiation that can harm your body in the same ways as radiation emitted by nuclear detonations. The main difference is that, for medical purposes, the radiation is applied in a controlled way.
The international standard unit for the dose of ionizing radiation is the Sievert. National guidelines in many countries warn against people having a cumulative dose of ionizing radiation exceeding 0.001 Sievert/year. The dose from a full body CT scan is 0.01 – 0.03 Sievert.
The ionizing radiation to which everybody in the vicinity of a nuclear detonation is exposed is so high and immediate that measuring in Sievert does not have much meaning. Such exposures are measured in Gray, where five Gray is reckoned to be lethal to 50% of those exposed (LD50). Even though these types of exposures are not directly comparable, for the common types of ionizing radiation, 1 Gray equals approximately 1.3 Sievert. … continue
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