On April 8, 2026, readers of The New York Post awoke to this headline: “Apocalypse Not Now.” It capped an unparalleled 24 hours of national and international anxiety over whether a full-scale attack on Iran by Israel and the United States would proceed and succeed to pulverize Iran “back to the Stone Age.”

All of us experienced an escalating drumroll of tension, thanks to newscasts and commentaries all day and into early evening, about what might happen at 8 p.m. (the deadline imposed on Iran). An hour before the 8 p.m. deadline, a temporary truce of two weeks was announced.

With hardly a pause, the nation’s anxiety level was kicked up an additional notch by Anthropic’s announcement—on the same day as the Israel-US-Iran impasse reached a temporary solution—of a very limited release of Claude Mythos2 Preview. The accompanying description by Anthropic described Claude Mythos2 Preview as a generational leap in AI beyond Anthropic’s Claude and all other existing AI models. For instance, Claude Mythos2 Preview can rapidly identify weaknesses in security systems and exploit them with an accuracy never previously encountered; plan and execute military attacks totally independent of any human input. “The fallout—for economies, public safety, and national security—could be severe.”

To address the consequences of releasing such a leviathan upon an unprepared world, Anthropic set up “Project Glasswing,” composed of frontline AI developers and technology companies, and aimed at locating and patching potential security breaches.

According to the Project Glasswing release, “The software that all of us rely on every day—responsible for running banking systems, storing medical records, linking-up logistics networks, keeping power grids functioning, and much more … has always contained bugs … some are serious security flaws that … could allow cyber attackers to hijack systems, disrupt operations or steal data.”

These two seemingly separate developments in the Middle East and at Anthropic share a common effect: the creation of mounting pervasive anxiety. As both dilemmas increase in complexity and—most importantly, threat—the level of anxiety grows disproportionately. What makes anxiety so threatening in our increasingly unstable 21st century is its engagement with a growing mass of people, both nationally and internationally.

Although we don’t usually place personal and communal anxiety among the determinants of whether a nation goes to war, the universal experience of anxiety has always been a highly volatile contributor to international relations.

“Insecurity at both the personal and collective level forms the basis for anxiety,” according to Guido den Dekker of the Department of International Law at the University of Amsterdam. In a paper titled “From human insecurity to international armed conflict,” den Dekker wrote: “International security normally depends on security of individuals … Fears and perceptions of threat by other states may give rise to hostile international reactions affecting an already unstable society.”

Fear vs. Anxiety

At all times, it’s necessary to distinguish fear from anxiety. I’m thinking now of a friend who, two summers ago, drove to his vacation cabin in Maine. When he pulled up to the garage door and opened it, he found himself face-to-face with a bear. That’s fear.

Last summer, when driving up there again, he experienced a slowly escalating sense of foreboding and uneasiness about whether or not the bear might have returned. That’s anxiety.

The Anxiety Matrix

In contrast to fear, anxiety is more pervasive and constitutes a widespread, nameless, uncomfortable feeling that something is dreadfully wrong, or may go wrong at any moment. Unsurprisingly, anxiety makes people more edgy: prone to impatience and temper outbursts within a setting of difficulty with concentration.

Not everyone is equally predisposed to anxiety. According to psychologists Raymond B. Cattell and Ivan H. Scheier, working in the 1960s, two groups stood out when testing for anxiety. The first experienced state anxiety, active episodes of anxiety; a second group, trait anxiety, a propensity towards experiencing mild degrees of anxiety, which sometimes reaches the severity of an acute anxiety episode. Not everyone fits this dichotomy between state and trait. We all know people who at least appear and act imperturbably.

But starting in the 2000s, the number of people fitting the clinical definition of anxiety (not counting anxious people, who don’t quite make the cut for a clinically defined anxiety disorder) increased dramatically. In a 2021 study, the World Health Organization estimated that 359 million people worldwide suffer from clinically significant anxiety. One in 4 adult Americans experiences an acute anxiety episode yearly.

Even simple words, phrases, or acronyms can arouse anxiety, even among those with nothing to get anxious about, i.e., a letter arriving in today’s mail from the IRS.

The anxiety matrix is currently all-encompassing thanks to the internet and media.

How Politicians Leverage Anxiety

When an anxiety-arousing event happens anywhere in the world, reports about it quickly escalate from news flashes to around-the-clock coverage to streaming commentary by “experts,” whose opinions are by-screened beside repetitive streaming videos.

Within such a setting, it doesn’t take much for a political leader or leaders to make the population of their nation more anxious. Yet why would a political leader or leaders do this?

For one thing, anxious people seek surcease from their anxiety by seeking the safety and protection perceived to be provided by the leader against designated enemies.

In a phrase, anxious people are more influenceable and can be more easily convinced that a war will make them feel better—a sort of anxiety catharsis by war. In response, a population will, secondary to perceptions of violence and threats of violence, accept conditions that ordinarily they would spurn: acceptance of preemptory military actions in excess of what is allowable under the accepted rules of engagement.

This isn’t to say that anxiety is all bad. If we couldn’t experience anxiety, we wouldn’t be able to imagine or express creativity, both of which share with anxiety the capacity to discern “the shape of things unseen,” as mellifluously described by neurologist Adam Zeman.

Best to think of anxiety as Janus-faced: capable of looking towards war and other catastrophes while also turning towards creativity and imagination.