Whenever America starts a war with a nuclear power everyone starts yelling about WW3 and it's only just occurred to me that when Americans say 'WW3' they are at least partially expressing an anxiety that this time their government's blind aggression might have hit somebody who'll actually hit back.
I was gonna say 'like WW2' but then rapidly remembered that neither of the existing world wars involved like. much of any direct damage to civilian populations either because America's eternal wars haven't touched its own soil since like the 1860s. except for Pearl Harbour, which was literally One Attack in the whole of WW2 (and which was also primarily targeting a military base. and was in a colonized nation far from the mainland USA). I am not kidding if you look up 'attacks on American soil' every single thing since 1900 except individual attacks (Pearl Harbour and 9/11, basically plus a couple of border skirmishes with Mexico) is like 'America was attacked In The Gulf States' or 'America was attacked In Asia'. like mate where is the US? you can't count attacks on military bases as 'attacks on US soil' unless you need to bulk out the list which. look at the history.
Like imo one of the reasons the US is so comfortable being leisurely belligerent against Literally Any Country In The World is that it's been literally well over a century since the fight actually came to them. why WOULD the US government stop being blindly aggressive when the only costs are financial?
and instead of being primarily concerned about like. the actual thousands of people who are actually gonna die in these strikes. every time the US's unprovoked aggression hits a nuclear state of a state with a measure of international heft, the loudest concern from Americans is OH NO WHAT IF THIS ONE'S WW3
because. war is so abstract and foreign. because it's spent 150 years constantly happening Over There and only involving Americans who are in the military. foreign wars don't register as a threat because they're NOT a threat to Americans (the only Real People) and the way in which they're frightening is the abstract possibility that the other party might at some point bring America actually into the war. which has basically never happened so it's this vast unknown threat.
(the UK btw is also not immune to this but it's a wee bit different. our economy was permanently crippled by direct damage in WW2 and the Irish republicans got a lot of hits in so there's still some memory that War Has Consequences. but by and large we still approach war as something that Happens Elsewhere and are scandalised by the idea it might directly affect us at home. this is still a fairly abstracted and fictionalised threat to us which we treat as More Worrying than the actual bombings currently happening, but I just don't think it's as completely abstracted as the American relationship to foreign wars)
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