WASHINGTON, DC—Earlier this week, the term “World War III” was trending on Twitter in the aftermath of the news and responses to a targeted airstrike by the United States that killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Iraq. As Iran state TV said Tuesday evening that Tehran had launched a missile attack on Iraq’s Ain Assad airbase which houses U.S. troops, such apocalyptic fears must have only been reinforced.

Is this the 21st century’s Franz Ferdinand moment? Is this how another world war begins?

The experts I spoke with suggest that anyone losing sleep over that apocalyptic prospect can take a deep breath, enjoy a break from cable news for a few minutes, and relax a bit.

“This is an issue of popular culture rather than political analysis,” says Aaron David Miller, an expert on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “I don’t feel that it’s appropriate. It’s not tethered to, in my judgment, to reality. The Middle East is an angry, broken, dysfunctional place. It’s been that way for as long as I’ve been in government and outside of government. It’s not 9/11. We’re not looking at the prospects of terror attacks in the United States. World War III. I think there’s an enormous amount of hype going on here.”

Other experts I spoke with agreed. While back-and-forth explosive attacks and retaliations like the missile attacks we saw Tuesday are expected, a large-scale global ground war would be unlikely.

“To put my professor hat on, a lot depends on what we mean by ‘war.’ It’s quite plausible to me that Iran will respond and that the United States will bomb Iran or otherwise strike in response to the response. And you do have the possibility of further escalation,” Daniel Byman, an expert on foreign policy and the Middle East with the influential think tank Brookings said in an email sent in the afternoon, before Iran’s missile response was launched. “But I see it more likely to be a limited shadow war, with an array of Iranian attacks and U.S. responses. The death and conflict will be real, but it will probably be short of what we usually think of as war.”

The U.S. response to Iran’s retaliation was uncertain Tuesday evening. “The President has been briefed and is monitoring the situation closely and consulting with his national security team,” White House spokesperson Stephanie Grisham said in a statement circulated by the White House press pool Tuesday evening.

Paul Rosenzweig, a national security and cybersecurity expert at the R Street Institute, said some of Iran’s response will likely take a different approach, “Iran has a history of acting asymmetrically, especially in the cyber space,” Rosenzweig says, citing several recent examples including a denial of service attack on the American banking industry early in the 2010s. “That’s kind of the way they roll. And my guess, which is as good a guess as any, is that that’s how they’ll roll this time. What we’ll see is some kind of asymmetric response, parts of which will be cyber related,” he says. “

“Not quite a Cold War, but it’s not a hot war, either. It’s a lukewarm war, if you want.”

Which is not to say that it will be without significant consequences for the U.S. and its allies — indeed, some are being felt already.

As recently as a few weeks ago, masses of Iranians were protesting their own government in the streets, and this attack has seemingly united them against a foreign attack on a high-ranking government official. Stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons has been a cornerstone of Middle Eastern foreign policy under successive U.S. presidents, and in the wake of the killing, Iran has announced it will no longer agree to the limits contained in a 2015 nuclear deal. The influence of Iran on Iraq has also been a grave concern to the American government, and after the Soleimani attack the Iraqi parliament voted to asked all foreign troops to leave, which would push it further under Iran’s influence.

And the fight against ISIS in Iraq and the region has been put on hold while U.S. allies focus on protecting themselves. The Canadian military, which is leading a NATO training mission to battle ISIS, announced an “operational pause in Iraq” on Tuesday to relocate soldiers to ensure the “safety and security of our personnel while the situation develops.”

The U.S. position in Iraq, meanwhile, has been a source of some confusion. A letter circulated Monday from the U.S. military seemed to suggest they were preparing to withdraw in response to the Iraqi parliament’s request — though U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper clarified it was a draft letter being worked on with the Iraqis that was released by mistake, and that U.S. troops have no plans to leave. President Donald Trump has suggested he’d bill the country for a military base and impose harsh economic sanctions if Iraq makes the U.S. leave.

“This is a crisis, the first serious real-time foreign policy crisis the Trump administration has faced,” Miller says, one that “embodies most of the worst elements of Trump’s foreign policy” in that it pursues discrete acts which are “untethered and unmoored from any broad set of realistic and attainable goals.” In that respect, he says, it is a tactical success in removing a man widely agreed to be murderous and dangerous, while producing a set of strategic failures.

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Byman argued a similar point in a recent essay for Vox. “How bloody the aftermath will be, and whether the United States can emerge stronger, will depend on whether the Trump administration can be steadfast, plan for the long term, and work closely with allies. Trump’s Middle East policy so far, however, suggests the opposite is more likely. In the end, Soleimani’s death may prove a hollow and short-lived victory.”

Not likely to lead to a world war. But certainly not likely to bring anyone closer to world peace, either.

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