Not in tiny steps but in one great leap, the United States has triggered, and itself soon will experience, a frightful period of total war that extends far beyond the Middle East. And it is occurring in the usual impenetrable fog of war.
Though Americans experienced total war during the 1861-1865 Civil War, the concept generally has been a European staple, with origins in the Franco-Prussian War in the late 19th century and with horrifying applicability during the two world wars of the 20th.
The fog of war — an image sometimes attributed to the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz — has its own peril. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations Centre has warned of the “increased risk of miscalculation or misidentification, particularly in proximity to military units.”
The term “total war” has many meanings, but the relevant one now is the elimination of the distinction between civilians and combatants — and the way the effects of warfare aren’t confined to the battlefront but instead creep into manifold areas of life, in the countries where combat is being conducted and in countries far from the spheres of operation.
The war is but a week old, but already it has spread wreckage across the Middle East, spread to countries that weren’t parties of the operation plan, altered the power calculus throughout the region, caused stresses and strains in America’s major alliances, split the country at home — even as its tentacles are creating the beginnings of a home front in North America. There won’t be ration cards or blackout curtains, but effects will be felt here.
The battles of the American Revolution had only marginal effects in Great Britain, confined primarily to costlier consumer goods. But the combat in the world wars created enormous disruption far from the battlefields, in extreme cases taking form in widespread hunger.
The main theater of operations is Iran, where the United States and Israel are conducting intensifying combat. But just as the Oct. 7, 2023, Hammas raid in Israel prompted a ferocious reaction, the attack on Iran has spawned a violent reaction by Tehran, reaching all six of the Gulf States, otherwise bystanders to this conflict.
The combination of the attacks and counterattacks has implications for the world’s oil supply, eventually affecting home heating bills and prices at the gasoline pump. Although Donald Trump has spoken of a flood of oil from Venezuela, the output from there won’t begin to pick up the slack.
About a fifth of the world’s oil supply, accounting for about 20 million barrels a day, comes through the Strait of Hormuz, now the most dangerous waterway in the world.
Oil sloshes through the world, with supply disruptions in one part of the globe causing disruptions thousands of miles away. With much of Iran’s oil ordinarily sent to China, the reduction of oil supplies heading there means Beijing must find supplies elsewhere, resulting in stresses on oil trade patterns, shortages and price hikes. The cessation of liquefied natural gas production in Qatar means the same thing: higher prices.
“Energy price increases will hit consumers directly when filling up their cars or heating their homes,” Sarah Schiffling, deputy director of the Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Research Institute at Finland’s Hanken School of Economics, wrote in the online publication The Conversation. “They also affect companies across a wide range of industries. This has the potential to cause further supply chain disruptions.”
Almost forgotten in the fog of this war: About a third of the world’s fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz.
But energy and fertilizer are not the only vital segments of the economy that will be affected and that will spur side effects across the globe, including in the United States — a matter of political risk for Republicans, already imperiled as the November midterm congressional elections grow near.
An example of how disruptions growing out of actual combat have effects elsewhere is in air travel, which has been curtailed across the Middle East. Attacks in Dubai and Abu Dhabi affect Emirates and Etihad airlines, with ripples across the globe. Dubai is the site of the world’s biggest airport, surpassing Atlanta in passenger travel, according to the Official Airline Guide.
“The wider the war gets, the more uncertainty it introduces,” said Christopher Ragan, a McGill University economist. “Uncertainty is a killer for investment. The longer this goes on, there’s increasing uncertainty in a world where U.S. protectionism already has created uncertainty.”
Then there are the security threats posed by Iran, considered the world’s greatest exporter of terrorism.
Ali Larijani, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps veteran who runs the Supreme National Security Council, has indicated that retaliating for the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will be broad. Iran already has hit civilian sites such as hotels in Dubai. As noncombatants in Iran are killed or injured, the threat to noncombatants elsewhere almost certainly will grow.
For more than a year, Iranian agents have targeted the Canadian human-rights advocate Irwin Cotler, who has been provided with around-the-clock protection in his Montreal home. The threat of an assassination attempt on Cotler, which the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said was serious and, in November 2024, considered imminent, apparently was foiled.
Among the great unknowns in this episode: the number of Iranian sleeper cells in North America, and the number of loyalists to the Iranian theocracy living here and motivated to strike the country that, since 1979, Iran has considered the “Great Satan.”
“There’s an enormous amount of unpredictability about the possibility in which individuals will take things into their own hands in a destructive way,” said Nina Srinivasan Rathbun, an international security expert at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.
At the same time, Trump, preoccupied with war command, eventually will have to attend to growing dissension in the MAGA ranks among those infuriated that a movement that once spoke of “no forever wars,” “America First” and an end to nation building is grappling with a leader who is challenging all three precepts.
Wars create upheaval, sow confusion and inevitably involve unintended events.
The world that eventually emerges from that fog always is profoundly changed, with the international balance of power altered, sometimes with old alliances frayed and new ones created, and with new uncertainties replacing the old ones. This war will be no different.
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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