Are We Already in World War III? Ukraine, Iran, and the New Global Conflict | Paul Poast

[00:00:00] Will the regional conflict in the Persian Gulf escalate into a world war? According to Paul Poast from the University of Chicago, it already has. He joins us to discuss his argument that America is facing a new world war as we fight multiple wars on multiple continents at the same time, drawing both the attention and ire of other great powers. How is this world war different than the wars we fought in the 20th century? And is the international system evolving into something new or returning to an older state of normalcy?

[00:00:27] These are questions that America must contend with and hopefully sort out the answers to before we get drawn into a more direct conflict with another nuclear armed power. If you've enjoyed this content and it's been valuable to you, please like, subscribe, and share your favorite episode with a friend. It really helps get the show out to more people. With that, let's get to our conversation with Paul Poast from the University of Chicago. All right, Paul, good morning and welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today, sir? I'm doing just fine. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:00:55] It's great to have you here. Really enjoyed the piece you recently wrote in The New York Times. But for folks who aren't familiar with your work, can you introduce yourself in your own words to the audience? Absolutely. So I am an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. My area of expertise is international relations, international politics, largely focused on security issues. I've written on alliances. I've written on the economics of warfare.

[00:01:22] I write about trends in war, which probably relates most prominently to The New York Times piece that you refer to. I'm also a senior non-resident fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Nice. So you wrote this piece in The New York Times, and we'll throw a link to it in the show notes for folks to find. But you made a very interesting argument that the U.S. is now in a new era of world war.

[00:01:50] That's quite the claim, because we've heard great power competition, an era of persistent conflict. You know, these are things I've heard thrown around in the past decade or so. But a full-blown we're back in a world war. That is quite interesting. Makes folks think we're in early, you know, 1914. So what do you mean by we're in an era of world war?

[00:02:11] Absolutely. So the first thing to clarify is, and I tried to get this across in the piece and in other times that I've brought up this argument, is I'm not saying that we're back in a situation like World War I or the Second World War. And what I mean by that is we're not at, fortunately, a level of global conflict that is at that scale,

[00:02:35] where you're talking about millions of battlefield deaths, massive deployments of millions of troops onto various fronts, all the features that we think of with the First World War, Second World War. Instead, I'm referring to a situation that's more analogous to the other world wars that we have witnessed in history. So despite the fact that we refer to it as the First World War and Second World War, they are not, in fact, the First World War or the Second World War.

[00:03:04] They are instead the First World War. One could go back even further in this, but it is not uncommon to refer to the example that I think is more representative, which is the Seven Years' War from the middle of the 1700s being actually more representative of what we're talking about. And for a lot of American listeners, the Seven Years' War isn't necessarily something that they're as familiar with, but the French-Indian War would be something that they would be familiar with.

[00:03:31] And that's something we tend to do, especially in the U.S. education system, is we talk about the French-Indian War instead of the Seven Years' War. We talk about the War of 1812 and kind of leave out that it was part of the Napoleonic Wars, for example. So it's in reference to more of that kind of conflict. And what do I mean by that? So for me, a world war meets the following definition, which is you have to have two conflicts,

[00:03:59] at least two conflicts, happening on different continents simultaneously. And you have to have the fighting between those conflicts be integrated, interconnected, even have the participants making planning and strategic decisions across the two conflicts. And you also have to have the involvement of major powers in those conflicts. And you have to have the direct involvement of major powers in those conflicts.

[00:04:28] And so applying that definition to the current environment, I'm referring to, of course, the war in Ukraine and the war in Iran as being the two key theaters of this world war. Where in the war in Ukraine, which, of course, you could go back to 2014 to say that's when it started, but the full invasion in February of 2022, that war involving Russia directly fighting Ukraine

[00:04:56] with the United States for most of this war, and including now providing a high level of assistance to Ukraine in prosecuting that war. Everything from weapons to targeting to training to advising, as I say, doing almost everything except pulling the trigger. You also have now with the war in Iran, of course, the U.S. being one of the main participants in that war.

[00:05:23] But you also have Russia doing a lot of the same things that the U.S. was doing for Ukraine, doing those things for Iran. So you have now both wars involving major powers on either side. You also have the other participants in these wars, Iran themselves. You could focus on Iran. Iran obviously being one of the participants in the war in Iran,

[00:05:47] but Iran also having long provided technology drones to Russia to prosecute its war in Ukraine. You have Ukraine coming down and actually providing assistance to the United States into Gulf states on how to shoot down the drones that were being launched by Iran. So you're seeing all these countries in the conflict between the two wars that these countries are involved with

[00:06:14] becoming integrated and occurring at the same time, simultaneous. And so it's those criteria that lead me to say, look, this meets the definition of a world war. Okay. So for folks who grew up during the global war on terror and they heard, you know, Mattis Milley talk about this new era of persistent competition or great power competition, is this a rebranding of what they were saying?

[00:06:39] Or does the current level of violence with Ukraine and Iran mean that we have now triggered this world war scenario that is in addition to persistent competition or in relation to? I would say it's more that latter. It is more that this is something that has grown out of that great power competition, that higher level of global violence. So one way to

[00:07:05] describe this is I had this piece in the New York Times a few weeks ago that, of course, is the basis for this conversation. But prior to that, back in November of 2023, I published a piece in The Atlantic where the title of that piece was a not a world war, but a world at war. And so what I was talking about in that piece was how 2023 marked the highest level

[00:07:33] of global conflict witnessed in any year since the end of the world of Second World War. And then that year was matched and exceeded by 2024. 2025 then was kind of maintaining the level of 2024. So it was not a record level, but it marks and this was a phrase that I used other individuals who track global conflicts use. But 2025 kind of marked a new normal of global conflict.

[00:08:03] And that's all levels and types of global militarized conflict. So that's everything from interstate wars to civil wars, insurgencies, but anything that we would label as military conflict. 2023, 2024, 2025 were these new peak levels. And in fact, that trend, according to data from various institutions that track this kind of track conflict. So this includes ACLED.

[00:08:32] This includes the Uppsala Conflict Data Project. And that's actually the entity that I refer to most in when making these making these arguments. There's a little bit of depending on how you're capturing who's involved and when the start dates are. But this trend started in the mid to late 20 teens is when you started to see this uptick in conflict. And then by the 2020s, it's starting to reach this new high level.

[00:09:03] That but hence the title of that piece in the Atlantic. I didn't say that was a world war. I just said we were a world at war. There was wars happening all over the place of different types. You could talk about the war in Gaza. You could talk about the war in Ukraine. But they didn't have this simultaneity interconnectedness of warfare that we are witnessing with the war in Iran and the war in Ukraine. And that is what kind of took it now to a different level.

[00:09:35] Another thing that I've mentioned when talking about this argument is if you go back to the Second World War, we refer to it as the Second World War. But it wasn't really a global war. It was actually a series of wars that were all simultaneous and interconnected. Japan, they had the Pacific War. You had the Russo or not the Russo, but the Soviet Nazi war after Operation Barbarossa.

[00:10:02] These are in many ways separate conflicts, separate wars, but they're integrated and they're occurring. They're involving similar states. They're occurring because of one. So, for example, Japan starts to execute its southern strategy largely because they're like, oh, well, Soviet Union is now bogged down with Operation Barbarossa.

[00:10:25] We could start to execute our operations into Southeast Asia and, of course, Japan and Germany, Nazi Germany are allied at this time. But in many ways, these were separate conflicts that became integrated. And that's why we then refer to this as a world war. Now, going back to what I said before, I'm not saying that we're at a level of warfare like we witnessed during the Second World War.

[00:10:52] But we are, at least according to how I would define this, we are in a condition of world war. Okay. So you're looking at world war as a series of states that are competing with each other across multiple geographic areas. And what happens in those geographic areas impact their competition in every other geographic area. Exactly. And the key thing is that it's military warfare.

[00:11:18] So you could have a situation like the Cold War where you could have states, you could have the U.S. and the Soviet Union competing with each other across different domains and different geographic areas. And indeed, there have been some scholars, Elliot Cohen being most notable, who did label the Cold War as saying that was really World War III.

[00:11:42] I don't go as far as to say that because what was missing with that was the simultaneous integrated military conflict and specifically warfare. So the way that I even describe this to people is if the war in Vietnam and the Soviet war in Afghanistan had happened at the same time, then I might have said during that time period, you have a world war happening.

[00:12:09] Because now you have a very analogous situation to what you're witnessing today. But instead, you had the Vietnam War. And of course, the Soviets are providing assistance to North Vietnam during that time. China's providing assistance. The U.S. is directly fighting. You then have the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan taking place several years after that war, where the U.S. is now basically doing the same thing as the Soviets were doing. But the wars weren't simultaneous. And so in that sense, they weren't integrated.

[00:12:38] So we never reached that point of world war that we are witnessing now. And so that to me is the biggest distinction is that for me, world war has to be there's actual wars happening, military fighting happening. But it's in these different theaters on different continents that become simultaneous that are simultaneous and integrated. Okay, let's let's make this even muddier because very interesting.

[00:13:04] So yet Vietnam and Afghanistan clear examples of warfare, but differentiated in time and space. So it's not technically a world war by your definition. But I have to ask, how do we define what constitutes military action, what constitutes a war? Because we could look at during Cold War, you know, activities in Greece, activities in South America, activities in East Berlin,

[00:13:24] where there was violent interstate competition of military nature between the U.S. and Soviet Union, but doesn't generally get conceived of as open warfare. So I guess what level of military conflict do we need to reach for that to be a war in this context? I would say you would have to reach a level where one would define it as a classic war.

[00:13:51] And so so you're exactly right. You could have military competition. You could even have violence. You could even have fighting break out, but it could be sporadic. It could be short term. It could lead to a low number of fatalities or casualties. And all of those would not reach the classification of a war. So as part of this, I like this question because it allows us to kind of talk a little bit about, well, what is a war?

[00:14:15] All right. What is a war and how is a war different from just military competition, deterrence, proxy warfare, et cetera? So. There's within the discipline of international relations and the folks who go about trying to classify when wars have happened and and the outcomes of those wars. First, one of the key things you first of all, you have to have involved is you have to have organized militaries of a nature.

[00:14:44] And of course, that could be broadly defined because how do you classify a rebel group? It doesn't necessarily have to be a government. And you have to have that. You have to have sustained fighting. So it can't just be a one off incident that, you know, it could be significant. But like Operation Midnight Hammer wasn't a war. It took place during a war, but that wouldn't necessarily have that. That event by itself was a one off event. The Maduro raid in January, that was not a war between the U.S. and Venezuela.

[00:15:11] That was a very quick operation that, again, resulted in casualties. There was military operation. There was some fighting, but there was not. It didn't have that sustained nature that you also need for warfare. And then the other key part is you need to have the conflict reach a certain level of fatalities. Now, there's a debate about how much fatality there has to be or casualty levels there has to be.

[00:15:36] Some organizations such as the Coral It's a War Project, they use a threshold of a thousand battlefield deaths. You have to reach that level of the military personnel. This is setting aside civilian casualties, civilians, which that's a whole other issue we could talk about. But just military personnel. Coral It's a War Project defines that as a thousand. UPSLA Conflict Data Project, UCDP that I referred to earlier, uses 500.

[00:16:02] So you can argue about what the threshold should be for a war. But there has to be at least an accumulation of battlefield deaths at a level that then also helps to make it a war. So those are all the other elements to it. And that is what can then help differentiate it from other types of military conflict that we have a name for.

[00:16:29] In my discipline, we refer to those as militarized interstate disputes. And so those could be any type of conflict, mobilize everything from a threat to use force to the mobilization to the actual use of force, but not reaching the threshold or the criteria that I was describing before of sustained conflict and reaching a certain level of violence as measured through deaths to actually classify as a war.

[00:16:55] So I think that's kind of one of the ways to think about the episodes that you were referring to absolutely would be classified as militarized interstate disputes or amidst as we like to use that terminology. But they wouldn't reach that threshold of war. And I think that's real important to then be able to say something is part of a world war. Gotcha. So you put world war in this context of historical precedent going back seven years war, you know, war in 1812 was part of the Napoleonic Wars.

[00:17:25] At what point in history do we start having what would qualify as a world war versus, you know, an interstate conflict on the European continent? You know, when did world wars, as we understand them with this definition, become historically viable? For folks who have tried to go about and classify the world wars and there's.

[00:17:48] There's been several attempts to try to do this, but the starting point is always the beginning of what Jack Levy, who's a professor at Rutgers University, refers to as the modern great power system. And that started right at the end of the 1400s, 1495. So you think about like Christopher Columbus going out and discovering, quote, the new world, but basically the beginning of European global colonialism and global empire.

[00:18:14] So at that point, once that begins, you're now creating conditions to where you can have this multi continental fighting occurring because European powers actually have an interest and an ability to be fighting on multiple continents. And so really the age of global warfare can start around the late, again, 1400s.

[00:18:43] But the first world war is really in around the time of the 1700s. And this is where you start to get into the various like wars of Spanish secession, Austrian secession, you know, these kind of various wars that happened in the early 1700s. But as going back to what I was saying before, the war that is usually referred to as or I not say usually, but probably there's at least.

[00:19:12] More people than not would say this is definitely on the list and this is probably the first truly global world war would be that seven years war in the 1750s to the 1760s. There's a little bit of debate about whether it was truly seven years or nine years, but, you know, it's referred to as the seven years war. And I thought we were just the French and Indian war. Yes, exactly. Exactly. On this side of the pond. No, OK, exactly. On this side of the pond. And so it's all about where that starting point is. But yeah.

[00:19:39] And so that's a conflict that was primarily fought in Europe and North America. But you also had conflict occurring because of their colonial possessions. You had conflict in Africa. You had some conflict in actually in Asia. You had some conflict in South America. Those were more on a lower level compared to the major battles that were occurring in North America and in Europe.

[00:20:03] Now, and to contrast that, I think maybe it's useful if you go back to another major war that was earlier that quite a few people would have some familiarity with. And that is the 30 years war of the middle early to middle 1600s. And that is a that was a huge conflict that involved many great powers coming in. That was fought over basically control of Central Europe. And it was a complex war.

[00:20:31] You had all these little German states and statelets fighting each other. You had major Sweden coming in and France and Britain. And then they would leave. And sometimes they'd be aligned. And sometimes they fight against each other. It was very complex, but it was limited to. The European continent. And so in that sense, you could possibly make an argument that it was a world war since these were all the colonial powers. But it didn't have that fighting on multiple continents.

[00:20:58] And so according to my definition, you couldn't go back and say that was the first war. OK, so let's get to languages between Ukraine and Iran, because it's almost weird to try to link these things to Iran, which is a theocratic country and the Middle East. And then you've got, you know, Russia, partly in Europe, partly in Asia. But, you know, a communist path, former communist state with no religion. Now it's an oligarchy with close ties to the Russian Orthodox Church, mostly for marketing purposes, it appears like.

[00:21:28] But how do, you know, conflicts with these nations interact? Because we even have different sets of allies involved. You know, and with Ukraine, we've got the European countries and NATO. With Iran, we've got Israel and the Gulf states. So how are these connected? So, first of all, I love how you're phrasing it because it just points to the complications.

[00:21:50] That there are also complications like this in any world war where you're going to have these various kind of, if you will, marriages of convenience that have formed. It's like, you know, we're not really aligned. We don't necessarily agree with everything you do except for the fact that you're opposing the same side that we want to oppose. And therefore, we'll work together with this. And you can see that, especially on the side of Russia, its relationships with Iran. And of course, a country we haven't really talked about yet, but it's very important to this is China.

[00:22:17] And we can get more into the role that China has been playing as an enabler of Russia's war in Ukraine and an enabler of even Iran's ability to be able to prosecute the war. It's strange to say I was like, prosecute the war in Iran, but nevertheless, enable Iran to be able to fight and stand up to the United States and Israel in that war, in that theater.

[00:22:46] So, you know, that's a whole other country we need to talk about. But for me, when I look at the sides, clearly you have the United States as complicated as it is, as complex as U.S. domestic politics has made in terms of, you know, what does the president think? You had Joe Biden expressing things one way, President Trump expressing things the other way. But even despite all that, it's still pretty clear that like the U.S. is on this one side of the war in Ukraine that is supporting Ukraine.

[00:23:14] It changed how they've done that support. So under the Biden administration, it was just direct military aid to Ukraine. Under the Trump administration, it's been the U.S. selling weapons through the Pearl program, selling weapons to NATO and then they using those weapons to supply Ukraine. But it's that's mostly I don't want to be too dismissive of it. But to me, that's just an accounting mechanism. It's just, OK, where's the money going and how is it going? But at the end of the day, it's U.S. weapons going to Ukraine to help them to be able to fight this war.

[00:23:45] And so the U.S. is obviously on that side. And then, of course, the U.S. is also attacking Iran along with its assistance with Israel in the war in Iran. And the U.S. has these various commitments, defensive commitments to Gulf states and, of course, has U.S. bases in these Gulf states. But they, in many ways, were kind of caught up in this conflict as opposed to being directly involved in this conflict.

[00:24:13] They were even President Trump saying, I was surprised that they got attacked. Of course, other people saying, no, we told you that this would probably happen. This was like a very predictable thing that was going to occur. But very little that we've seen has actually been that surprising to anyone with Wikipedia and some common sense. But that's just me speaking from a point of sadness. Yes, exactly. It's like who would have thought he would. It's like, I don't know. That's something that analysts of this region have been pointing to for like at least a few decades that Iran could.

[00:24:42] I mean, I'm just a schmuck with a microphone. I'm like, I don't think this is going to go well. What's the plan? Oh, there's no plan. Oh, OK. Exactly. Exactly. It's like this is I mean, not to go off the topic of the question here, but like, you know, when. President Trump has said things like, you know, I'm not I'm trying to do something. None of my predecessors have ever done. And it's like, well, first of all, he's not doing a good job of it.

[00:25:07] But secondly, is is there's probably a reason that your predecessors chose not to do this. I mean, part of my understanding that the war in Iraq happened back in 2003 was if you remember, if you go back to there, there was this whole discussion of the axis of evil and the axis of evil from the Bush administration standpoint was Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

[00:25:29] Yeah. Well, by that point, North Korea was kind of I don't want to say a lost cause, but it was like North Korea is going to get a nuclear weapon and maybe we can retain on where it at 30,000 U.S. troops there. And so it was really about Iran and Iraq. My understanding is that the deliberations in the Bush administration was that and and Colin Powell may very well play the key role in this is that Iran is too difficult. Like you just you can't you can't go after Iran militarily. So they're just not an option.

[00:25:57] And so it's like, OK, well, then Iraq is clearly then, you know, draws the short straw on this, if you will. So that is but I mean, that's just a case of like there's a reason why they're like even the Bush administration is like, no, no, we're not going after Iran as military because it's just it's too difficult. And and and even if you do gain military superiority, they just have all these asymmetric ways to create chaos in the region, firing rockets at the various Gulf allies, closing the Strait of Hormuz.

[00:26:26] It's like at the end of the day, you can't beat geography and Iran has a key geographic advantage that just makes it very difficult to be able to carry out operation like this. So, you know, we could go back on that tangent, but I think that's important to lay out here. But where this was brought up, which is that these Gulf states are being brought into this largely because of the U.S. and Israel then carrying out this military operation. And that's different than the NATO allies.

[00:26:56] Obviously, in some respects, you could say NATO allies were also caught flat footed and indeed they were by the Russian full invasion of Ukraine. And so they're suddenly scrambling. But the big difference is Russia did not then proceed to also attack those days. But the fear was that they would. And that's my you know, that's my understanding going back to 2022 was that the NATO allies said if we don't stop Russia to Ukraine, they're going to then proceed further.

[00:27:23] They're going to potentially even attack the Baltic states, thinking that that's an easy target. So we have to draw a line in Ukraine. So the dynamics are different between the Gulf states and the NATO allies. But the situation is similar in the fact that this was not something that they were involved in starting. But suddenly they're caught up in it and they have to respond to it. So that's kind of the one side of it. And then the other side is, of course, you have Russia.

[00:27:51] And really, in many ways, you have Russia. Russia is the key actor in both these wars, I would argue, the United States and Russia. But that Russia, of course, is directly the war in Ukraine. But I think absent Russian support to Iran, the Iran, the whole situation in Iran would have gone very differently. Iran may not have been able to feel like it could draw a hard line with respect to its nuclear program.

[00:28:17] It maybe could have it would not have necessarily had the support that it needed to be able to build up its military capacity. And this is going back over the years, the relationship between Iran and Russia. But then more notably is during the war itself, Russia providing then direct assistance, targeting assistance, weapons and so forth to Iran, just as Iran was providing assistance to Russia.

[00:28:41] Now, you pointed out in your question, like, look, I mean, there's some ideological differences, religious differences. You could get into all this. But what unifies them is this notion of people refer to it as the axis of resistance. But it's this notion that we may not agree on everything except that we're tired of a U.S.-led international order. And we want to try to disrupt that border. And I think that's something that can unify both Iran and Russia in their views.

[00:29:09] And then, of course, China, who has been, again, kind of in the background here, but I think very much enabling both of these conflicts through economic exchange, through technological exchange, even some lower level military exchange, has also also shares that view of I don't know if we're keen on the continuation of a U.S.-led global order. Okay. Would that be an example of balancing?

[00:29:36] You could absolutely say that that's an example of balancing, that one of the big things that perplexed scholars for a long time when they talked about the idea of balancing and, you know, and balancing being this notion that you have a dominant power and other countries do not want to allow that country to be dominant because they'll be able to coerce them or even conquer them. So other countries will band together to balance them, to kind of even the scale.

[00:30:07] And one of the big things for really a few decades, especially after the 1990s and the collapse of the Soviet Union was, why are we not witnessing balancing against the United States? Why is everybody just kind of like going along with like, oh, yeah, the U.S. is the hegemonic power, unipolar moment, whatever you want to refer to it as. And people were trying to explain that away. Well, the U.S. is a naval power, not a land power, and land powers are more threatening. There's been all sorts of theorizing.

[00:30:33] But part of it could have just simply been that the states that were potentially able to balance and would have an interest in balancing weren't yet powerful enough to do so. And Russia was kind of in disarray after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And it took a decade plus for them to be able to gain their footing, if you will, to be able to then resurge or resurrect themselves. Then same thing with China was still rising and kept referring to China's rising.

[00:31:01] So neither one was really in a position to do anything. And so for that reason, for much of the 1990s and early 2000s, the U.S. was instead focused on, quote, rogue states, focused on these smaller countries that seemed like they were going to be disruptive to the global order. That takes us back to Iraq. Iran was still in that category, North Korea in that category. But you didn't yet – they weren't balancing. They were just countries that were perceived as, hence, rogues, pariahs that are going against and we can police them.

[00:31:30] But now you have a resurgence of two – and I would classify both of them as great powers, Russia and China, that are now able to at least enact some policies to try to balance against the United States. Okay. So we've got this great power of Russia that's regained its footing. It's in a world war with the United States on two theaters, Ukraine and Iran. China's out there as a potential third power that might come in here and ruin everyone's party.

[00:31:57] But how do actions by Russia and the U.S. in Ukraine or Iran impact their ability to operate near the theater? I guess we can take the American example. How does America's prosecution of the war with Iran impact its ability to compete with Russia and Ukraine? I would go even one step further. I think, well, first of all, you could directly answer that question in saying it dramatically hurts the U.S.'s ability to do that.

[00:32:23] Because munitions, anti-aircraft weaponry, anti-missile defense systems, all this that could have gone to Ukraine is being diverted to the war in Iran. And we also saw a similar dynamic playing out with the war in Gaza when the U.S. is trying to support Israel in the war in Gaza. And some munitions that were supposed to go to Ukraine were being diverted to Israel just because there is this there is a shortage of munitions.

[00:32:50] And this is a big challenge with the defense industrial base the U.S. has. And just and it's not a unique challenge. It's like historically this has always been the case. It's not if you will, it's not politically attractive, politically sexy to build up munitions. You know, instead, it's it's politically more popular to have a big battleship created. Just saying. Right. Or to have a new aircraft built. Those are the things that politicians will push for.

[00:33:16] And I know it's going to push for, you know, we should just stock up a bunch of, you know, shells. We should just stock up a bunch of missiles. We should just stock up a bunch of ammo. It's like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We have GPS guided munitions. Who thinks we're going to need 155 millimeter shells for a great power competition with Russia that we're going to give to some other nation to shoot for us? Yeah, exactly. And burn through in two years. It burned through in two years.

[00:33:38] Yeah. So it's like this is so I mean, but, you know, it's just a way of saying that the fact that we have these munition shortages are not just like some bad policy decision that someone foolish. It's like it's actually quite common even historically to see that this is the case that countries tend to like neglect that until suddenly they're like, oh, wow, we need to start ramping this up. And then, of course, World War Two is a good example of that with the U.S.

[00:34:04] suddenly not just producing massive levels of ships and planes and tanks, but also just churning out munitions, churning out shelves, refrigerator factories getting converted over to just pumping these things out. But it took time to do that. So, yes, it's affected. It's impacted the war in Ukraine. European countries are trying to pick that up. They're trying to get this. Why? That's been a big debate within them of trying to raise their military profile.

[00:34:34] I think the maybe the Economist magazine this week has a story titled like the the return of the year of the German military power or something like that. But it's it's it's about these debates of, OK, the Europeans are going to have to pick it up even more and more quickly due to the U.S. being a position to not provide as many arms as was expected. For me, I think another concern, maybe the bigger concern.

[00:35:02] And I know others have been tracking this as well, is going back to the China question, which is that if the U.S. is now having to divert munitions, divert anti-ballistic missile systems, anti-aircraft systems from, say, South Korea or from Taiwan, hence they canceled an order that was supposed to be delivered to Taiwan because they needed to ship that over to the Middle East.

[00:35:28] Does that now put Taiwan in a more vulnerable position or or I should say and or does it send a signal to Beijing? You know what? The U.S. is actually not in position right now to fully defend Taiwan. And should we think about taking action against Taiwan? So that's a big concern. And if you do that, then this world war, then I think, you know, rather than my thesis of we're in a world war being like, oh, yeah, that's that's kind of interesting.

[00:35:57] We talk about people would be like, yes, we are totally in one now because now we've got a third front. Right. We've got a war in Taiwan. So, yes, the fact that the U.S. is burning through munitions in the manner that it is in the war to Iran is absolutely going to have these spillover effects into these other theaters, either theaters where there is war already happening, hence Ukraine or potential theaters like Taiwan. Yeah. So munitions are a very tangible way to look at, you know, warfare.

[00:36:26] But, you know, historically, it's always been a struggle. You can understand this is just the cost of doing business. But how do things like financial markets or oil markets play into how what happens in Iran impacts what happens in Ukraine? Because we've seen in an effort to, you know, quiet the oil markets as unsuccessfully as that has been taking shankens off Russian oil so it can be put into the market, which gives them more money to fight Ukraine in order to address the effects of fighting Iran.

[00:36:55] It seems like this vicious cycle. So how do you how do U.S. planners and policymakers look at, OK, we're fighting in Iran, we're fighting in Ukraine? You know, how do we prioritize what tools we use, where, what tradeoffs we have to accept? So I think this is a product of making it up as they're going along, unfortunately. God, I was hoping that wasn't the answer. OK. Somebody out there told me there's a plan and actually made it. Shit. Yes, exactly. No, I think this is.

[00:37:24] I think because that is and you're exactly right. You said it perfectly that this is a situation where it's like to think about the second order effects. Right. And that's really what you're that's how I would classify what you're talking about here is these second order effects, which is, OK, they've closed the straight of four moves. That's causing challenges for global oil supply, even though the U.S. itself doesn't receive a lot of oil from there. It is still creating huge challenges for the global oil market to relieve that pressure.

[00:37:54] We got we got to find a way to relieve the pressure. Hey. No lower sanctions on one of these other oil producers that happens to be Russia. That sounds like a great idea. Oh, wait, we're fighting. We're technically fighting a war against Russia and they need money and this will give them more money. Plus, the already the spike in oil prices is giving them more money, let alone the fact they can now sell more of the oil to be able to generate the hard currency.

[00:38:19] They need to be able to continue to purchase weapons from immunitions and technology from China to be able to continue to fight their war. Or this is yes, this is absolutely the second order. First order effect, the closing the straight of four moves that causes a bad thing. Oh, now we'll try it. But then the second order is and they're there for now. It allows Russia to gain more energy revenues.

[00:38:43] And again, it's something that points to exactly why or is yet another reason why I think previous. Administrations said tacking Iran is a bad idea.

[00:38:58] It is just not going to go well because even if we don't get involved in a, quote, forever war, even if we don't try to execute a ground war, we are still going to be in a situation where there's going to be all of these other knock on effects. Chaos because of the hard truths of geography that Iran, because of where they're located, it doesn't take much for Iran to create massive chaos in the Middle East region.

[00:39:28] Closing the straight of four moves, targeting refinery facilities in other Gulf states. And this is going to have all these profound second order effects that are going to take a long time to unwind. I think by now people have seen the reports that even if the war fully ended tomorrow and Iran and the U.S. sign an agreement, they're like, we're going to get along and we're great and everything's great.

[00:39:51] It's still going to take at least six months to clear out any mines from the from the Strait of Hormuz region to be able to allow ships to feel comfortable going through, to allow insurance companies to actually give insurance for these ships to go through. And what that points to is just the economic damage is already going to be sustained and lasting, even if the war officially ends tomorrow.

[00:40:19] Let's take a second to look at alliances, because with China and Russia as two emerging world powers, great powers in this multiproler world that we're slowly, quickly, I don't know how you pace these things developing into. Right. You know, prior to this, we've seen NATO arguably the most successful military alliance in history. We have all of Europe, you know, the counteracting to balancing is bandwagoning.

[00:40:44] You have all of Europe essentially bandwagoning to the United States and going along with the U.S. in order to counter Russia because Europe was incapable of balancing internally against Russia. You can argue you saw the same thing happen with South Korea, Japan, Australia, Vietnam post that war, where those countries bandwagoned to the U.S. as a way to make up for the fact that they could not on their own balance against China as a regional bloc.

[00:41:09] You know, this war has really strained the crap, particularly out of our NATO alliances in public. And of course, South Korea is watching us pull that interceptors that's supposed to protect them against North Korea, a way to go help, you know, Israel and Gulf states. Japan is very upset for all sorts of reasons.

[00:41:29] But as strained as those alliances are from a relationship standpoint, it almost seems in this new multipolar world that we're going into, the same dynamics that form those alliances become more important. So is the way that this war with Iran and Ukraine being fought in this multipolar world that we're going into, is this having a net positive or net negative effect on these alliance structures?

[00:41:57] Because it almost seems like as it's making these relationships far more tense and toxic, it's also making them far more necessary from just a structural standpoint. Trevor Burrus There's absolutely been kind of both of these are both of those views, the way you stated at the end, I think works really well that I've seen the arguments that this is the end of NATO.

[00:42:19] And because of the fact that the Trump administration or just more specifically, Donald Trump's been so upset with the NATO allies for not providing assistance to open up the Strait of Hormuz, that that has, you know, this is the end of that alliance.

[00:43:01] Trevor Burrus Now, I even joke, you know, fine could be in the case of that meme where, you know, this is fine and everything's on fire around you. But I think that... Trevor Burrus It's like a patient on dialysis. Yeah, they're living. Yeah, they're fine, quote unquote, but they're stuck in the hospital on life support. Trevor Burrus Yeah, exactly. And this is, this is, this is a big, this is a big challenge. I don't, but I don't think it's fine in that level.

[00:43:24] I think it's fine in the fact that more along the lines of what you're getting at, which is where else are things like, basically, where else are these allies going to go? And what else is the US going to do? Now, what do I mean by both those things? Let's start with the US is going to do. I think the Trump administration, there's two things to keep in mind with the Trump administration when it comes to allies.

[00:43:49] First of all, Donald Trump, going back to his first administration, hugely critical of the spending and burden sharing by US NATO allies and allies in general. But as I point out, I've done research on this, like that's par for the course. You go through and basically since NATO was created, there's been either a US president or secretary of defense who has complained about free riding NATO allies. The way that I like to say it is Trump would get angry.

[00:44:18] Obama wouldn't get angry. He would just be disappointed. But in both cases, it was the same argument. Somehow the disappointment hurts more. And the disappointment hurts more. Exactly. The disappointment hurts more. Sorry, that might be me projecting. My apologies. But the point is, is the same, which is that, yeah, they were criticizing, like you guys are not spending enough. You need to do more. You need to pick this up. So that I always felt like that's par for the course.

[00:44:46] Trump voices it differently, but it's the same idea. And indeed, we've seen movement by these countries, even before Trump, with the Wales pledge by the NATO allies to spend 2 percent, now moving up to what they're calling the Hague pledge for 5 percent. But there is a need for that. And that's been a longstanding aspect of the alliance. So I think that's one thing that one thing to think about.

[00:45:10] But the other one is that I think Donald Trump at first was very much a. I had very much a 19th century mentality about the world. I even went so far as to say Donald Trump was going to be a great 19th century president. And the reason was because, you know, he would invoke even during his first term. He would talk about Andrew Jackson.

[00:45:35] And then when he was running again, he was talking about William McKinley and he kept referring to all these things. It was like in his mind, you know, whenever. Whenever you hear the phrase, make America great again, the big question was, well, what's again like what period is he talking about here? And it's not the 1980s, even though that's when he really came to prominence. It's not the 1950s right after World War Two. It's 1890 to 1910.

[00:46:00] That is like the era in Trump's mind that the U.S. was at its best. And you can find statements where he's even referred to it as such either in his second inaugural address. That's the period that he is like, this is when the U.S. was its best. So he wants at first, you know, my view was everything he's doing is recreating that tariffs. That's when we have tariffs, colonialism. We're going to gain even his whole obsession with Greenland is like we need to expand our territories. That's what you do. That's what we did in the 19th century.

[00:46:31] But I think there was another part of Trump. That also liked the idea of the U.S. being the indispensable nation, which was this comment, this phrase that, of course, Malin Albright, Secretary of State, used that in reference, the idea, no matter what the issue is in the world, the U.S. has to be involved in trying to. So we're the indispensable nation. And I think Trump actually always liked that idea, but just had a different way of understanding it, which is that the U.S. is indispensable.

[00:46:59] But through him, he can go around and fix all these issues. And so hence his bragging about look how many wars I've solved. Look at this. And then there's also another part of history that he's always likes to refer to, which is it's notable the number of times Trump refers to World War II history. He refers to World War II history a lot. You know, he'll talk about when he was at the World Economic Forum. He made comments about how if it wasn't for the U.S., all of you would be speaking German or Japanese.

[00:47:30] You know, he makes those kind of comments and he likes to refer how the U.S. came in and saved Europe and Europe did this. He he always refers to this. And I think that part of him has started to win out, which is that we can go around and fix all these problems. And because he loves World War II, he used it as the military is a key instrument for doing that. We can go around and that's where him and he and Hegseth kind of align very much.

[00:47:57] It's, hey, the military could be this key instrument for the U.S. to go around, be the indispensable nation. So the reason why I'm sharing all that is because I think that has then in turn allowed Trump to better understand what U.S. allies do for the U.S., which is that, oh, they give the U.S. global leverage. They give the U.S. access. It is, you know, the biggest thing he's been frustrated about has been, wait, we have a base and you're not letting us use the base.

[00:48:27] We can't fly through your like the access that is offered by U.S. alliances is something that I think he has grown to appreciate. This was a big reason why he was keen on trying to regain U.S. bases in Afghanistan. Afterwards, he's like, hey, we need those bases. This gives us access to China. And I think he has started to appreciate that. Wow. You know what? Even if these guys are free riding, even doing this, it's really useful to have a U.S. base there.

[00:48:55] And I think he's become aware of that as he's bought more into this U.S. could play this global role. Realizing you can't just carry out every single operation from the Western hemisphere. You've got to have these basing. I think that was intentional to have Mertz, the German chancellor, right there with him as a press conference at the beginning of the war because the U.S. is running so many operations out of Germany. And I think he has grown to appreciate that.

[00:49:23] And so what that means is, well, we need these allies. You know, I may not like it, but I think he's maybe this is something he's actually won. That's at least my theory on Trump. So that's a long answer to the value of allies. But I do think Trump views allies as valuable for that very instrumental reason, which is this is what allows the U.S. to project power abroad.

[00:49:48] Speaking of Trump and allies in World War Two and being at a, you know, new world war here, the last world war in the American imagination ended with nuclear weapons. Yeah. Is there a risk, especially with somebody like Trump, who is very impulsive, not a dumb guy, the way people describe it, also not a deep thinker. Is there is there a risk of putting this narrative out here that we are now in a world war that somebody like him goes, well, what would we do last time?

[00:50:17] Newcomb? Ah, fuck it. Let's go it again. Does that increase the opportunity? Does that increase the risk of him walking up the escalation ladder to that point? Right. Or absolutely cool or be cool with Israel doing it? Yeah. Well, so this is this is absolutely one of the concerns that I had when he started dropping the phrase unconditional surrender early on. I'm like, oh, he's clearly drawn that from his World War Two obsession. Right. And we saw what that eventually led to.

[00:50:45] Now, subsequently, in fact, I think just yesterday at a press conference, he was asked that question and he even said to the reporter, he said, that's a stupid question. What? No one should be using nuclear weapons. We shouldn't do this, which. OK, great. OK, so that that's that sounds good. Didn't he used to say that going to war with Iran would be stupid? Yes, exactly. So there's there's a couple of there's a couple of problems here. One of them is he has said, yeah, going to war with Iran.

[00:51:11] I mean, during the presidential campaign in 2024, you know, he said if you elect Harris, we're going to be all the Middle East is going to be engulfed in war. Right. I mean, that was. And so look what's happened. So, yeah. So that's one reason to not take that fully as a reassuring comment. The other reason is that part of his rationale for saying that that was a stupid question was he said we already have military superiority over Obama.

[00:51:37] So it wasn't to say it wasn't so much an invoking of the nuclear taboo, the idea that, no, you would never under any circumstances ever consider using nuclear weapons. It was more of why would we need to use them? We don't need to use them in this case because we have military superiority. But what that the reason why that's just that's that's concerning is because what if something were to happen to make him change his mind on that and say, oh, OK, maybe we do need to use it.

[00:52:06] Or maybe there are circumstances where Israel feels like they need to use it and he's going to go ahead and sign off on it. Now, prior to this war, I would have said that's less likely because we even saw several episodes where Trump, because of his relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, was able to kind of pull Netanyahu in.

[00:52:29] Right. That was going back to the 12 day war last year where when it looked like it was going to fall apart and Trump dropped an F bomb on live television, kind of expressing how upset he was that it looked like Israel and we're going to go to war again. That's one instance. There was the Israel, Israeli operation in Qatar that against Hamas officials that Trump was not happy with and kind of pulled things back there.

[00:52:53] So you can imagine there was all these times where it's like, OK, he actually can kind of get Netanyahu if he wants to do so to pull back. This is this wars, you know, at least according to the reporting we've seen, was a little bit the opposite. Right. Which was that. And now I'll kind of convince Trump. Hey, no, now is actually an optimal time to do this. You also had MBS of Saudi Arabia, apparently behind the scenes, also encouraging it. And so Trump seemed like or like, oh, yeah, OK, we'll do this now.

[00:53:19] But in both cases, it makes you a little bit more concerned that Trump would not just say, oh, we're not going to do this. I think that's a bad idea that there are conditions where he could be convinced otherwise. And that's where the nuclear option does become a little bit concerning. Yeah. Well, we're getting close on time. But, you know, so America has found itself in this unique spot in history. We're fighting, you know, a world war, but it's below the threshold of conflict that we're used to.

[00:53:48] For all the planners and the administration, all these, you know, curb bureaucrats that we love to throw shade at, none of them grew up in an environment where they had to plan for this. You know, the models that they were taught through their professional military education or what they go through at the State Department don't really account for this. So if you had to give them a model to or a recommendation for how to start thinking about winning in this new environment

[00:54:13] as we're trying to play catch up to where we find ourselves, you know, where would you steer, you know, a J-5 for a geographic command commander or a senior State Department advisor who's actually trying to create a policy that will let America succeed in this environment? Because if this truly is the environment that we're into, this will outlast the Trump administration. Well, the one answer to that is they should all watch the movie War Games, right? And that the only way to win is not to play.

[00:54:41] And so, you know, so that is... It's kind of like walking to the casino. You're better off staying outside. You're better off staying outside. The moment you step in, it's like, nope, forget about winning at this point. And there is some truth to that, that this is a situation where it's not about finding the optimal. It's about finding the least bad outcome. And I think what happens is, is that in the current environment, the Trump administration keeps stumbling into the least bad out... or into not the least bad outcome, but avoiding the least bad outcome.

[00:55:10] They keep finding bad outcomes. Maybe not the worst outcome. The worst outcome would be nuclear weapons start getting dropped. But they're finding bad outcomes, such as all the things we've been talking about. The oil prices going up and not maybe considering those second order effects. The desire to... The convincing that this would be an easy operation and therefore we could carry this out and be done with it quickly instead of really sitting there going,

[00:55:38] well, wait, maybe there was a reason that other folks decided not to do this, including other Republican administrations chose not to do this. Maybe we should think about those situations. But so far, they've done a poor job of trying to avoid... of trying to secure the least bad outcome. Because you're only facing bad outcomes when you're in a world war type situation. So I think that's the one thing is, yes, the best strategy is not to play.

[00:56:05] But if you are involved with it, then you have to try to find the least bad outcomes. Now, what are those least bad outcomes? Well, unfortunately, I'm not sure that the current administration wants to try to do it. And that is one of the least bad outcomes is, you know what, go ahead and admit this was a mess up and just go ahead and take it and say, we're going to sign whatever deal we need to get this done and we're going to be done with it.

[00:56:32] I mean, in many ways, if you think back to the end of the Afghanistan war and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, that was not handled well. But you also have to say, and I made this argument at the time, that perhaps the bigger problem with how the U.S. left Afghanistan was that it left Afghanistan after 20 years. That like, why didn't it leave Afghanistan after 10 years? Why didn't it leave Afghanistan after five years?

[00:56:57] Why did it get sucked up into this sunk cost fallacy and just say, you know what, we've achieved what we needed to achieve. Maybe after the Sama Bin Laden raid, be like, hey, you know what? I think that's it. We're done. Like, let's just find a way to get out. And I think that's one thing is there's kind of a need for people to say, what is a sunk cost here? And can we just incur it, get the damage done, damage control and move on so that we don't continue to compound these second order effects.

[00:57:26] That, OK, the oil markets are doing this. That's allowing Russia to do that. But then that allows Russia to now have more capability. Does Russia start to get aggressive against other states? If we keep having our resources drained here, does that make China feel like they could now take action against Taiwan? Right. So the longer we go of getting caught up in a sunk cost of we just got to keep fighting until we can find something that looks acceptable and palatable versus just saying, you know what? It's done.

[00:57:54] We just got to get out or else there's going to be these worse effects down the road. Election results be damned. We just got to get this done. And I think that's the biggest thing that planners need to think about. And I'm not sure that the current administration is in a position to be able to do that, just like the Bush administration was in a position to do that with Afghanistan. Even the Obama administration was in a position to do it. Even the first Trump administration was. It was finally Biden who said, you know what?

[00:58:23] We're just we're done and we're out. And and it's going to be ugly and no one's going to like it. And I'm probably going to take flack for it. But the long term effects might actually be the least bad outcome. Wow. Well, that is not very encouraging how the rest of the conflict is going to play out. But it makes sense to me. Not sure it's getting to the administration. But, you know, I know there are some folks out there listening. So hopefully they can whisper something in somebody's ear. I read somewhere that you get a book coming out soon. Is that true?

[00:58:52] I have a book that just came out. Just came out. Plug it, please. Well, and by just mean it came out in August. But it's it's a book titled Weed at War. And it's actually surprisingly relevant for today, which is in a snapshot. What the book deals with is the book deals with how did the allied powers during World War One solve their wheat shortages? And this was and the reason why this is fascinating is because during the war.

[00:59:21] Especially by the time you get to 1916, they're they're facing immense wheat shortages, both for civilians as well as military personnel. Now, the reason why is because of like German unrestricted submarine warfare, sinking ships that are trying to bring wheat over from North America. But also North America experiencing this thing called crop or stem rust that was causing it was a pandemic wiping out the crops. So they're like desperate situation to try to figure this out.

[00:59:50] But they end up doing is creating these super national institutions to make all the distribution decisions for them. And so basically it's about the creation of that institution and the various types of economic cooperation institutions that the allied powers created during World War One to fix these supply issues. And these global economic disruptions that were being caused by that war.

[01:00:38] Like place orders with us and work with us. And then it led to, well, what happened when the war ended and why did they not continue these institutions? And that leads to a broader lesson from the book, which is that they did not continue these institutions after World War One. Eventually, we see what happens, the Great Depression, global Great Depression, lack of economic cooperation, coordination. They learn their lesson at World War Two.

[01:01:06] So in World War Two, they recreate a lot of these institutions. And then after the war, unlike after World War One, they decide to actually create global economic cooperative institutions because they realize that these are actually valuable and can help prevent these. So that's where your Bretton Woods institutions come from, the IMF, World Bank, eventually today World Trade Organization come from. The European Union, European coal and steel community at the time comes out of those lessons.

[01:01:34] So it's a book specifically about how the allied powers created international institutions to solve these supply issues. But then it also talks about the legacy of these lessons and about how these global economic institutions that exist today, they are really the product of these lessons from World War One. Wow. Very interesting. We might need something like that for oil and fertilizer here. Oh, and helium in the near future.

[01:01:59] That's exactly what I'm saying. I'm like, OK, you know, the book came out and then suddenly people are talking about, you know, all these commodity shortages and how are we going to handle this? And I'm like, well, I mean, this is this is a you know what? This is what happens when you get into a world war. Well said. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. We really enjoyed the conversation. Good luck out there in Chicago and hope to have you back on sometime in the future. Well, thank you, Scott. I very much enjoyed the conversation today.