Eliot Cohen, the director of strategic studies at the Paul H. Nitze School
of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, declared
in The Wall Street Journal, a month after the September 11 attacks, that
the struggle against terrorism was more than a law-enforcement
operation, and would require military conflict beyond the invasion of
Afghanistan. Cohen, like Marenches, considered World War III to be
history. "A less palatable but more accurate name is World War IV," he
wrote. "The Cold War was World War III, which reminds us that not all
global conflicts entail the movement of multi-million-man armies, or
conventional front lines on a map."
[7]
In a 2006 interview, U.S.
President George W. Bush labeled the ongoing War on Terror as
"World War III".
[8]
On the July 10, 2006 edition of Fox News' The Big Story, host John
Gibson interviewed Michael Ledeen, resident scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute For Public Policy Research (AEI), and said "some
are calling the global war on terror something else, something more like
World War III." But Ledeen responded that "it's more like World War IV
because there was a Cold War, which was certainly a world war."
Ledeen added that "probably the start of it [World War IV] was the
Iranian revolution of 1979." Similarly, on the May 24, 2011 edition of
CNBC's Kudlow and Company, host Lawrence Kudlow, discussing a
book by former deputy Under-Secretary of Defense Jed Babbin, said
"World War IV is the terror war, and war with China would be World
War V."
[9]
In 1989, CIA original operative, Miles Copeland, wrote that in the
future, World War Three would occur when "Soviet Russia" dupes the
United States and Israel into waging a self-destructive war with the
Muslim/Arab world.
[10]