Nothing captures attention in an age of media saturation like the talk of war. The recent decision by US President Donald Trump to assassinate a top Iranian official, Quds Force Commander Major General Qassem Soleimani, has conjured up the spectre of a wider conflict encompassing not just the Middle East but the broader world, as Iran's top leaders deemed it "an act of war" and vowed "severe revenge". Although Iran's military and its proxy militias and client states in the Middle East and elsewhere are poised to exact retribution for their loss, we are unlikely to see a world war in the immediate aftermath of this killing.
To be sure, Mr Trump's executive decision was unilateral and in flagrant violation of international law because the assassination was carried out in Iraq. As their sovereignty has been undermined, the Iraqis unsurprisingly want the US to leave for good. American forces there were never welcome since the Global War on Terror from 2003 but now they will be even more hard pressed to stay.
Mr Trump also cannot avoid accusations of deflecting public attention and congressional scrutiny in ongoing impeachment proceedings for his alleged abuse of power by leveraging the use of US aid policy in Ukraine for electoral benefit. As gruelling months loom ahead of the presidential election in November, Mr Trump is also under the spotlight for manipulating public opinion for a second term.
Clearly, the US assassination of Gen Soleimani, who had been running Iran's military operations around the Middle East, is illegitimate. Its timing was suspect, and its claim of "pre-emption" -- eliminating an enemy on the informational certainty of subsequent enemy action -- rings hollow.
But we are not going to have a third world war because the other major powers that are US rivals and adversaries are staying out of it. While they have military cooperation agreements with Iran, China and Russia are both standing down. This is not their fight. In the past two world conflicts, inter-locking alliances pitting one group of great powers against the other triggered chains of events that made war inevitable.
In fact, a perverse outcome of the Soleimani killing is that Mr Trump has helped pacify Iran's domestic discontent. Less than two months ago, the Iranian government of President Hassan Rouhani raised fuel prices substantially owing partly to western economic sanctions. The price hike caused widespread public protests in major Iranian cities. As the authorities quelled the protests, the death toll among demonstrators reportedly ran into the hundreds. Iran's domestic turmoil has subsided overnight after the US assassination.
If the initial Iranian firing of a bunch of missiles at US bases in Iraq that killed no one and inflicted limited damage ends up as the Islamic Republic's retaliation for the assassination, there are likely to be suspicions of a behind-the-scenes deal between the two apparently adversarial governments in Washington and Tehran.
What we now have from the US deadly drone strike on Gen Soleimani, along with Iran-supported Shia militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, is not a new but an ongoing war among concentric zones of Middle East warfare.
Foremost is the perennial war between Islam and the West. From the British and the French to the Russians and Americans, Western imperial powers have tried to dominate the Middle East at their peril, facing fierce and ferocious resistance all throughout. The British and the French shrewdly carved up the region between them, famously known as the Sykes-Picot agreement that lasted roughly 100 years from 1916, well captured in James Barr's 2011 book, A Line in the Sand.
After decades of turmoil and volatility in flirtation with pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism, the region fell under autocratic regimes with a relative balance of power among them that endured until the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the US by al-Qaeda. The US response initially uprooted autocratic regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq but later, reinforced by the Arab Spring movement in the early 2010s, more despotic regimes were brought down in places such as Libya and Syria, although the latter retained its autocracy within a much reduced territory.
The ensuing vacuum elicited an intra-Islam race to expand regional influence, led by Persian Iran's minority Shiism against Sunniism, which represents nearly 90% of the Muslim world. The Sunni patron, traditional Arab powerhouse and cradle of Islam is Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, Iran's Shia expansionism that dates from its Islamic revolution in 1979 has made headway into smaller client states, warfighting tribes and militias from Iraq and Syria to Lebanon, Yemen and beyond.
The fight for Islamic supremacy has projected both Iran's and Saudi Arabia's power, influence and resources all over the Middle East. But the Saudis have deeper pockets as an advantage. The killing of Gen Soleimani may enable the Iranian leadership to recalibrate and retrench their overstretched power projections.
Yet there is another chasm between secular and the more religious versions of Islam. As the largest Muslim country, Indonesia is secular, and so is Malaysia, notwithstanding militant and jihadist elements among them. Turkey, the seat of the old Ottoman Empire and a regional contender for influence, is also traditionally secular but with creeping Islamism under the current leadership.
In addition, there is a longstanding religious tension and state-level conflict between Muslim countries and Israel, which is Judaic with a Western orientation. Gen Soleimani was the commander of the Quds Force, and Quds means means Jerusalem in Persian and Arabic. Part of the murdered general's mission was to recapture Jerusalem from the Jewish state. While Israel has much to answer for at home with its dismal treatment of Palestinians, it is demonstrably surrounded by hostile states and militia groups, except Jordan and Egypt, with which it has signed peace treaties.
Overall, the Soleimani assassination is unlikely to catalyse a wider or global conflict beyond what has taken place in recent years. The Middle East's overlapping wars will likely continue as they have done over the centuries. The best possible outcome in the recent past was when autocratic Middle East states had a rough balance between military capabilities and shifting patron-client ties. Until the conditions of control and a new balance emerge, violence and conflict will likely remain the norm.
Thailand, as a predominantly Buddhist country with a significant secular Muslim minority, stands in relatively good stead. Persia then and Iran now is a friend much older than the US. Yet Thailand is a US treaty ally. Staying out of harm's way for Thailand means not taking sides while remaining vigilant to not allow others to use the country as a staging ground or venue to win a fight that belongs in their neighbourhood.