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World War III is Already Here

The Iran War is just the newest theater in a four-year global conflict

Julie Roginsky Mar 7 ∙

The mistake the West keeps making is assuming that wars arrive with formal declarations. That relic of the 20th century is long gone and has been since 1941.

These days, they arrive piecemeal — a drone swarm here, a cyberattack there, a proxy militia somewhere else — until one day the pattern becomes impossible to ignore.

That moment may already be behind us.

A disturbing picture has emerged over the last four years: the war that began with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was not a regional conflict. It was the opening salvo of a much larger global confrontation. Now that confrontation is spreading and the front line has moved to a new front.

First it was Kyiv. Now it is Tehran, the Persian Gulf, and the Middle East. The players, however, are exactly the same. On one side: Russia, Iran, and a quietly supportive China. On the other: the United States and its increasingly strained Western alliance system.

That alignment has been building for years. Consider the role Iran played in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the early months of the war, when Moscow’s military was faltering and its missile stockpiles were dwindling, Iran stepped in with a weapon that changed the battlefield: the Shahed-136 drone.

These low-cost, long-range “kamikaze drones” allowed Russian forces to keep striking Ukrainian cities and infrastructure even when their more expensive missiles were running short. Ukraine estimates that tens of thousands of Iranian-designed Shahed drones have been used against Ukrainian targets since the war began. Iran effectively became a crucial arms supplier to Moscow’s war machine.

The drones were cheap, easy to produce, and devastatingly effective at overwhelming air defenses. Russia eventually began producing its own versions under license from Iran, deepening the military partnership between the two countries.

In other words, the Ukraine war was already a coalition war — even if the West insisted on pretending otherwise. Now, that coalition is tightening in a way that is bringing the war home to us...

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