There are so many low-quality, kitsch-militarist, cringe aspects to the past several weeks’ bumble toward an AI-enabled, nuclear-curious World War III — or at least some vast, multi-theater, multinational regional conflict — that breed an easy gallows-humor cynicism.

Trump’s straight-to-streaming “Operation Epic Fury” branding of a US-Israeli assault on Iran deploys — with the husky-voiced bombast of a Dodge Ram commercial — the “Unmatched Power, Unrelenting Force of America’s Warriors.” The Department of War floods social media with video-gamified, Hollywood-sizzle-reeled war porn and AI-generated disinformation. Centrist dads choke up online at French President Emmanuel Macron’s staging a Casablanca-style sing-along of “La Marseillaise” in a submarine hangar while announcing plans to reverse course on decades of nuclear disarmament by expanding France’s arsenal. The US “AI and crypto czar” David Sacks warns that Israel could use its nuclear weapons in this conflict. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (I know, I thought he was dead too) endorses what he didn’t realize was a satirical article about how to overcome Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz by using “a dozen thermonuclear detonations” in friendly territory to cut “a waterway wider than the Panama Canal, deeper than Suez, and safe from Iranian attacks.”

Then there is the discarding of the postwar order itself, in blithe contempt for the UN Charter’s prohibition on what the Nuremberg Tribunal described as “the supreme international crime of aggression” that very straightforwardly boosts the chances of nuclear proliferation around the world — even as the assault was mounted, in Orwellian style, to fight nuclear proliferation in the Islamic Republic.