We could be on the brink of World War III. Israel assassinated a Hezbollah leader, Iran bombed Israel, Israel launched a ground invasion of Lebanon, and the United States deployed more troops and fighter jets to the Middle East. Israel won’t back down on Lebanon or Gaza, and both Israel and Iran have nuclear weapons.

It’s scary — and a bipartisan chorus of nerds who probably couldn’t win a bar fight is eager to make it even scarier.

“Chicken hawks” is the term of art for those who support wars and engage in bellicose rhetoric but have never put themselves on the front lines. Usually men, they may be overcompensating for battlefield heroics they’ve never attempted. Or they may just be bloodthirsty cowards.

It’s been quite a week for such figures. The United States has a clear path to peace, and perhaps even to Kamala Harris’s election, by stopping Israel’s war in Gaza. It’s obvious that Joe Biden isn’t doing enough to make that happen: while he sometimes whines about what Israel is doing, he keeps the supply of money and weapons flowing its way. If he were to cut off all military support to Israel, this metastasizing war would end. But the hardcore Iran chicken hawks don’t see the situation that way. To them, Biden is already doing too much to pursue peace. They have penned op-eds, written press releases, gone on national television, and tweeted, some of the safest known strategies for confronting our nation’s supposed enemies.

Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro — who thankfully was not chosen as Kamala Harris’s running mate, though he was seriously considered — once falsely claimed that he volunteered for the Israeli army, a boast that he had to walk back this summer after the Philadelphia Inquirer exposed it as a lie. Such embarrassing incidents haven’t humbled him, however, and he continues to weigh on the Middle East. This week, Shapiro, a rising star in the Democratic Party, went on Fox News and insisted, “We need to be strong against Iran.” He called Iran “no one’s friend in the peaceful world.” He didn’t say how specifically we should be “strong,” but by coming on Fox News and using these words, the idea of a forceful military response was implied.

The New York Times’ Bret Stephens went much further. In an article headlined “We Absolutely Do Need to Escalate in Iran,” Stephens made the insane argument that Biden would be wrong to rein in Israel’s response to Iran’s recent attack. Even more crazily, he called for a “direct and unmistakable American response” and urged Biden to destroy Iran’s missile-production sites “at a minimum.” Attacking Biden for taking too conciliatory an approach, Stephens claimed that “bully regimes respond to the stick” and “wars need to be fought through to an unequivocal victory.” Like a child playing a video game, Stephens fantasized about “Hezbollah’s decapitation” and “Hamas’s evisceration” without a word of caveat about the devastation endured by the people of Lebanon and Gaza, or the risks to all of us in a World War III with nuclear weapons.

Predictably and even more disturbingly, since it’s probably taken more seriously, the bipartisan think tank United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) has been echoing this reckless view all week. Led by former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who registered for the draft but then, when he had a choice, did not volunteer for Vietnam, and former George W. Bush administration official Mark Wallace, UANI also has an advisory board, which represents a who’s who of the foreign policy establishment (chicken) hawks, including Vietnam combat-avoider John Bolton but also less extreme figures like Graham Allison (a formidable Cold Warrior of both the Reagan and Clinton administrations, as well as Harvard’s Kennedy School, the CIA, and other major imperialist institutions); Obama, Clinton, and Bush administration alum Dennis Ross; and centrist intellectual Walter Russell Mead (Mead was once the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow at the US Council on Foreign Relations).

First, they insisted in a statement attributed to Bush and Wallace on the organization’s website — and promoted on UANI’s Twitter/X account — that “the United States must join Israel in striking back.” Later in the week, they rebuked Biden for sensibly refusing to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Everyone whose views I’ve discussed in this column (okay, except John Bolton) is a respected member of America’s governing class, yet their eagerness to wage war with Iran and risk global nuclear holocaust is just as crazy as that of their fellow chicken hawk, Donald Trump.

While working-class Americans and millions of Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, and other people were dying in Vietnam and in the forever wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, these chicken hawks were graduating from prep school, attending prestigious colleges, and generally embracing all the protected and cosseted opportunities that the ruling class offers to its young. Having enjoyed the cushy life of the young American elite, they now wish to condemn the rest of the world’s youth to an unending, futureless inferno of murder and destruction.