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The Geopolitics of World War III

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The Geopolitics of World War III
A Ukrainian soldier prepares mortar shells at a position along the front line in the Donetsk region on Sept. 26, 2022, amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images
Michael Hochberg
Leonard Hochberg
Updated:
News Analysis
On Jan. 2, 2024, Foreign Minister Israel Katz proclaimed “We’re in the middle of World War III against Iran [led] radical Islam, whose tentacles are already in Europe.” He claimed that Israel, in engaging in a war against Hamas and other Iranian proxies, was defending “everyone.” Although his rhetoric may seem overblown to many in the United States and Europe, it should not be dismissed out of hand. Sometimes, regional conflicts, such as the Japanese conquest of Manchuria of 1931–32 or the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39, foreshadow dangers that are more geographically extensive and militarily intense. Do the barbaric events of Oct. 7, 2023, and the Israeli military campaign in Gaza prefigure a broader, global armed conflict? Or is this merely a local conflict, one that is likely unresolvable short of one side or the other engaging in genocide or ethnic cleansing?
Michael Hochberg earned his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Caltech and is currently the president at Luminous Computing, a company building supercomputers for machine learning. He founded four companies, representing an exit value over a billion dollars in aggregate, spent some time as a tenured professor, and started the world’s first silicon photonics foundry service. He’s authored over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and has been an inventor on over 60 patents. He also co-authored a widely used textbook on silicon photonics, and has published work in Science, Nature, National Review, The Hill, American Spectator, RealClearDefense, Fast Company, among others.
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