Is the Third World War gonna happen?

@BlueVeins Specifically, Cold War, War on Terror and War on ISIL have each been referred to as World War III (Source: Wikipedia, unfortunately, but also memory). This of course means they usually intend to exclude each other, plus we actually have proper names for each already.

But yeah, I agree in military sense those could be WW3, WW4 and WW5. However, now US was hit militarily by a "hostile" nation and didn't retaliate (Has that ever happened?), and openly assassinated high foreign official of a group it's not in war with. I'm not saying that future hindsight (20/20 hah) will necessarily consider the Iran attack the specific beginning of the new conflict; Putin is a good candidate too.

War on ISIL (or Terror for that matter; but that was always too generic goal to meet) I think there's a high chance ISIL will rise again as a consequence, too. So would that make the new war WW6 or just WW5 continuation? Hypothetically, I mean everybody knows we'll keep off admitting WW3 until everybody is dead anyway. xD

I can't find reference to the theories counting economic wars as World Wars. Perhaps as well, I'm not sold on that idea, but as said it's philosophically interesting. There were also researchers who have had very good track record predicting global unrest with statistical methods, but I can't find that one just now either. I wonder what their models say about the unrest right now. However, the End of the World War 3 will always be a "Black Swan" event because most people don't intend that to happen.

@Faust76 Well, it's important to remember that "superpower" and "great power" aren't really the same thing, despite the similar wording of their definitions. The Wikipedia page on the subject lists eight contemporary great powers -- UK, PRC, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, and the good ol' USA.

It's also worth listing the great powers of 1939, to get a clearer understanding of that definition: UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, USSR, and USA. China would emerge as a great power in 1945. As we can see, all of these countries were directly involved in World War 2.

If we go back to that list for 2020 though, we can make a pretty strong argument for most of the great powers being involved in the War on Terror in some capacity. The UK and USA invaded Iraq together in 2003, among numerous other activities. France is extensively involved in Maghreb and Algeria. Germany and Italy are both marginally involved in Afghanistan. India's kinky love affair with Pakistan is largely a counter-terror activity. Russia's fighting an insurgency in Chechnya and the Syrian Civil War. The PRC has troops in Northern Mali. The only one that's really on the sidelines is Japan, I guess.

A fairly similar argument can be made for the Cold War on account of the fact that basically every country on the face of the Earth was involved, even the South American states. That argument would be much stronger.

@Faust76 I'm not sure if I would count the war on ISIL as separate from the War on Terror, generally though.

Capitalism doesn’t really care about peace I guess @BlueVeins

🤔@Biffed