By James J. Devine
They talked about World War III for so long that it became a joke. A punchline. Something for doomsday preppers and novelists.
Jokes have a way of dying when the first missiles fly, and on a Saturday in late February 2026, the joke died in Tehran.
The operation had a name, as all catastrophes do. “Operation Epic Fury,” the Pentagon called it, with that particular genius for branding that makes killing sound like a video game. But already, in the smoky bars where soldiers drink and the hushed corridors where diplomats whisper, it carries another name: Operation Epic Failure.
It is a bitter historical irony that the war now consuming the Middle East can be traced to a single signature eight years ago.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known as the Iran nuclear deal, was a 2015 agreement that the United States, United Kingdom, France, China, Russia, Germany, and the European Union reached with Iran’s to limit Islamic Republic’s nuclear program to ensure an exclusively peaceful nuclear program, with monitoring by the IAEA, in exchange for lifting international sanctions.
On May 8, 2018, eight days before Ramadan, President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA, a unilateral act that shredded a working diplomatic framework.
It set off a decade of escalating reprisals. And now, it resulted in open warfare.
Trump, elected to a second nonconsecutive term on a promise to end wars, has instead delivered the widest Middle Eastern conflict since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
And like that invasion, this one began with a certainty that has curdled into chaos, only now, Russia recently passed the fourth anniversary of its invasion of Ukraine—another military adventure that was expected to last less than a week.
The strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was precise. The strikes that followed, killing his designated successors, were equally precise. Precision, it turns out, is not the same as wisdom.
In the four days since, Iran has launched retaliatory strikes against at least eight Arab nations. American embassies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have been struck by drones. Six U.S. service members are dead. Eleven Israelis.
Nearly 800 Iranians, according to the Iranian Red Crescent, though that number cannot be independently verified, and grows by the hour.
A war that Trump predicted would last only a few days has morphed into one that might go for several weeks, and he is now saying perhaps it will go longer, still only three or four months, but hundreds of people have been killed so far, and anyone with an ounce of sense knows that anything can happen.
The State Department is urging Americans to leave 15 countries and territories across the Middle East. But when citizens call the number Secretary of State Marco Rubio provided for help, a recording tells them not to rely on the U.S. government for evacuation. There are no evacuation points, the recording says. There is no plan.
This is where certainty leads.
The war was supposed to last four to five weeks. That’s what the military projected. That’s what the president suggested. But wars have a way of ignoring projections, and this one is moving “substantially ahead of schedule,” as Trump himself noted, without apparent irony that the schedule in question is a timetable for destruction.
Three American F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets were downed over Kuwait by friendly fire. The pilots ejected safely. They are the lucky ones.
The conflict began, as these things always begin, with a red line. After the Iranian regime crushed protests in December, killing as many as 33,000 of its own citizens by some estimates, Trump issued a warning.
The regime shrugged. It murdered anyway. And so, as Bradley Bowman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies put it, “the president’s personal and political interests were at stake.”
They always are.
Negotiations followed. Talks to end Iran’s nuclear program. Talks led by Trump’s son-in-law and other emissaries. But the Iranians, according to administration officials, were never negotiating in good faith. They wanted the world’s most dangerous weapon. They would not be bargained out of it.
So the president chose the other option.
Now the question no one in Washington wants to answer: What comes next?
Iran is firing missiles in numbers that dwarf previous conflicts. More than 500 in the first three days alone, surpassing the total from the 12-day war last June.
They are striking Gulf states that were never supposed to be targets: Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. By attacking nearly every Arab country along the coast, Iran has done what decades of American diplomacy could not: It has unified an Arab-Israeli coalition against it.
That is the one piece of good news in this catastrophe. But good news has a way of sounding hollow when measured against body counts.
The regime, decapitated but not dead, views this as an existential fight.
When theocratic regimes fight for survival, they use everything. Iran has a global terror network: Hezbollah, the Houthis, and militias in Iraq. They have missiles and drones and a sick ideology that has already murdered tens of thousands of their own people. They may have people in your neighborhood ready to suit up for a mission from God.
What they do not have, yet, is nuclear weapons. The question that haunts every briefing, every strategy session, every sleepless night in the Pentagon is how long that remains true.
Trump has suggested the “big one” is still coming. Additional forces are being deployed. The scope of this conflict, already unprecedented, may expand further.
But expand into what?
World War III was always a hypothetical. A specter.
The war that would follow World War I and World War II, involving all the great powers, using weapons of mass destruction, surpassing all prior conflicts in scale, devastation, and loss of life.
For decades, it remained hypothetical because the United States and the Soviet Union never directly engaged. Mutually assured destruction worked. The bombs were too terrible to use.
That fragile understanding that some wars cannot be won and must never be fought is a deterrence that kept the peace for 75 years.
It is what allowed generations to grow up treating World War III as fiction.
But the Cold War ended in 1991, and with it, the clarity of that terror.
New threats emerged: terrorism, cyberwarfare, and now renewed great-power competition between the United States, China, and Russia, sometimes called a Second Cold War.
The Russo-Ukrainian war. The Middle Eastern crisis. Tensions over Taiwan. Each one a flashpoint. Each one is a match held over the same powder keg.
Turkey, a NATO ally, is mourning the death of Khamenei. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who met with Hamas after Oct. 7, who declared a day of mourning when Ismail Haniyeh was killed, now mourns the Iranian leader.
“I extend my condolences to the brotherly people of Iran, convey my sympathies on behalf of my country and nation, and wish Allah’s mercy upon Khamenei,” said Erdogan. “As Türkiye, we will firmly pursue our efforts to ensure that the people of Iran, along with all our friends, brothers, and sisters in the region, achieve the peace and stability they deserve, bring an end to the ongoing conflict in our region, and return to diplomacy.”
That does not mean Turkey will enter the conflict, but it means alliances we thought we understood are shifting in ways no one can predict.
China and Russia watch from the sidelines, providing dual-use support to Iran, sending chemical precursors for ballistic missiles, testing the limits of how close they can dance to the fire without burning. They do not want a world war. They are not stupid. But they are also not in control of events that have their own momentum now.
The Iranian people, meanwhile, are caught in the middle. Educated. Impressive. Not well-armed. The regime has already murdered more than 30,000 of them since December.
If they rise up now, as the president has urged, they will face thousands of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps members with weapons and a willingness to use them.
The call to revolution is easy from the safety of Washington. The reality of revolution is blood in the streets of Tehran.
And so the war continues. The strikes continue. The bodies accumulate.
In a video posted to social media, Secretary Rubio said the safety of American citizens is the No. 1 priority. But when those citizens call the number he provided, a recording tells them they are on their own.
That recording is the epitaph of this operation. That recording is the truth that all the press releases, briefings, and carefully crafted statements cannot obscure.
The smartest people on the planet spent decades warning about this moment. They drew the lines. They wrote the papers. They begged for restraint. And the great powers of the world — Russia, China, and the United States — looked at those warnings and chose aggression anyway.
Now the alarms have been sounded. The fuse is lit. And the only question that remains, the question no one can answer, is whether anyone left in charge is still capable of hearing the warnings over the sound of the bombs.
World War III was hypothetical until it wasn’t. It was a joke until the joke stopped being funny. It was something that happened to other generations until it happened to ours.
The operation has a name: Epic Fury. But names are cheap. What matters is what comes after. What matters is whether, when this is over, there is enough left of the world to call it anything at all.