World War threat is not real in current tension

The assassination of Iranian commander Gen Qasem Soleimani will not spark a Third World War as some have alluded to. It is true that the First World War was triggered by a remarkably similar event. A Bosnian-Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip, shot and killed heir-presumptive Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, triggering an unprecedented world war which claimed 17 million lives, injured 20 million and displaced millions.

Although the increasingly multi-polar conditions in international relations today may be similar to that of 1914, the competing power blocks today are unwilling to risk going to war. The risks of loss far outweigh the possible gains and advantages. Even Iran itself is unwilling to provoke a full-scale war with the US, and instead prefers to fight in the shadows, as it looks for an opportunity to exert what it calls strategic revenge on the US or its allies. Gavrilo’s action that triggered the First World War first and foremost threw the diplomatic community into confusion. It then created a crisis and an emergency. And because communication, then, was poor and rudimentary compared with today’s instantaneous multi-source, multi-form communications, the crisis became a complex emergency that could not be resolved by the tools available to diplomats at that time.