How close are we to World War Three?

Donald Trump has warned that conflicts such as the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war can quickly escalate into world wars.

“Things like this end up in third world wars. And I told that the other day. I said, ‘You know, everybody keeps playing games like this, you’ll end up in a third world war.’ And we don’t want to see that happen,” the US president told reporters in the Oval Office.

His comments reflect both the “fragile state of diplomacy in Russia’s full-scale invasion” and “the deep involvement of European nations, Nato and other powers in the conflict”, said Newsweek.

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But far from seeking to de-escalate tensions, the Trump administration, through its new security strategy, is “sowing the same seeds”, said The New York Times. “Its ideal of a world organised around a multi-front balance of power – with the US pushing against China, pushing against Russia, sowing division in Europe, threatening Latin America, with all countries, everywhere, angling for advantage – means there will most likely be more confrontation, more brinkmanship, more war.”

The result, said Nato secretary general Mark Rutte recently, is that “we must be prepared for the scale of war our parents and great-grandparents endured.”

Russia

Putin has until now been happy to stall on peace talks as Kremlin forces make slow but steady gains in Ukraine.

Earlier this month, Vladimir Putin rejected a US-brokered peace plan out of hand, but not before warning that although Russia did not want a war with Europe, it was ready to fight one if necessary. The Russian president accused European powers of hindering US attempts to end the war in Ukraine by putting forward proposals they knew would be “absolutely unacceptable” to Moscow.

Meanwhile, Moscow continues to launch drone strikes on Kyiv and has even begun to test Nato defences and resolve with a series of airspace incursions into Estonia, Romania and Poland.

This prompted the Polish PM to warn that his country was at its “closest to open conflict since the Second World War”, while a statement from Nato said the violations were “part of a wider pattern of increasingly irresponsible Russian behaviour”, with actions that are “escalatory, risk miscalculation and endanger lives”.

In a sign of the growing fear that an attack could be imminent, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as Poland and Finland, have announced they are withdrawing from a landmark landmine treaty as they seek to shore up their border defences with Russia. There have also been renewed efforts to revive a Baltic “bog belt” along Nato’s eastern flank to protect Europe from Russia.

While the Baltic states are the most likely target for a Russian invasion, Moscow has also begun ramping up production of hypersonic missiles. The intermediate-range weapons “are capable of striking targets up to 3,415 miles away, which puts locations across Europe and even the western US within their potential reach”, said The Economic Times.

The successful test of the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile – nicknamed the “Flying Chernobyl” because it emits radioactive exhaust from its unshielded reactor – is yet another escalation. The test on 21 October saw the missile fly for 15 hours non-stop and cover a distance of 14,000 km (8,700 miles) but its true range could be “unlimited”, Putin said. The Russian president's claim to now have the “highest level” nuclear arsenal in the world is a “chilling World War Three warning”, said The Mirror.

This week Belarus President and close Putin ally Aleksandr Lukashenko “sent a terrifying message to Nato leaders in Europe” by confirming Russian Oreshnik missiles had entered combat service in the former Soviet republic, The Express reported. The paper said the Kremlin has only used the “game-changing” nuclear-capable weapon once, in a “test” launch in November 2024 against Ukrainian city Dnipro, but this was “without a live warhead” in “an operation aimed at scaring both Kyiv and the West”.

Putin’s latest threats to expand the war into Europe “fit into a decades-long history of Russian – and Soviet – bluster towards the West”, said The i Paper. “But they also raise the question of whether the Russian president, who has turned his country into a de facto war economy, has the military and financial resources to pursue a wider conflict in Europe.”

The fear in Europe is that the Trump administration’s shift towards Moscow will “only embolden Russia’s military efforts in the region” and “encourage” Putin to “attack Nato next”, said Politico. European officials “do not think Putin’s ambitions end with Ukraine” and making territorial concessions would set a “concerning precedent” that other authoritarian regimes will follow.

If Russia takes military action against any Nato member state, it would force the military alliance into an all-out conflict. In that scenario, Russia could call on its allies to join in a global war. “Serious analysts express concern that Russia may escalate and the world, as it has done so many times in the era of mass warfare, may sleepwalk its way into an engulfing conflict,” said The New Statesman.

In reality, the likely threat from Russia is not a “full-scale invasion” but a “test: something ambiguous and tricky that will divide Nato, and thus discredit it”, said Edward Lucas in The Times. Some believe the recent drone and jet incursions are designed to do just that but, with Russia’s new supersonic missiles able to stretch from Moscow to any point in Europe, we are all on “the eastern flank now”.

China

Trump’s cosying-up to Putin has also drawn criticism on the other side of the world, with a senior Taiwanese military officer warning a Russian victory will only embolden China’s moves against the breakaway island. Addressing the Warsaw Security Forum, Hsieh Jih-sheng, deputy chief of the general staff for intelligence at Taiwan’s defence ministry, said: “If China moves on Taiwan while Russia increases its offensive in Ukraine, the world could face a two-front geopolitical crisis.”

It has long been assumed that the greatest threat to geopolitical stability is rising tension between China and the US, But while attention is currently fixed on trade between the two nations, most analysts expect a future military confrontation to centre on Taiwan. Beijing sees the island nation as an integral part of a unified Chinese territory. It has, in recent years, adopted an increasingly aggressive stance towards the island. It has denounced Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party, which won an unprecedented third term last year, as dangerous separatists. At the same time, the US has ramped up its support – financially, militarily and rhetorically – for Taiwan’s continued independence.

The most recent flashpoint has come not with the US but Japan. The country’s new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi infuriated Beijing by saying Tokyo could respond militarily if China were to try to seize control of Taiwan, and committed to pushing ahead with the planned deployment of missiles on Yonaguni, an island close to the breakaway territory.

China said the move was a “deliberate attempt to create regional tension and provoke military confrontation”, and warned that Japan would pay a “painful price” if it steps out of line.

While a full-scale war between the two historic regional rivals remains unlikely, the situation is “very sensitive”, and one wrong move could spark an escalation, Ashok Swain, professor of peace and security at Uppsala University, Sweden, told The Sun.

Earlier this year, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) conducted live-fire military exercises in the Taiwan Strait, drills seen as a “dress rehearsal for a possible real blockade in an attempt to overthrow the government in Taipei in the future”, said the BBC.

This year, China has “held live-fire drills on the doorsteps of Australia, Taiwan and Vietnam”, tested new landing barges on ships that “could facilitate an amphibious assault on Taiwan”, and unveiled deep-sea cable cutters “with the ability to switch off another country’s internet access – a tool no other nation admits to having”, said The Guardian.

Many observers anticipate that China will look to invade Taiwan by 2027, which is seen as a “magical” year because it marks the centenary of what was to become the PLA, said Robert Fox in London’s The Standard. The idea that this anniversary could coincide with a serious military operation by Beijing has become a “fixation” in Washington, said Defense News.

If there’s one ally almost every Republican in Washington wants to defend, it’s Taiwan against China, said Time. Beijing knows a full-scale invasion of Taiwan would “risk direct war with the US”.

To this end, China will be looking to expand its estimated 600 fielded nuclear warheads to compete with Russia and the US, Dr Sidharth Kaushal, from the Royal United Services Institute think tank, told The i Paper.

“This will make things even more complex for the US, because it will face the prospect theoretically of a China-Russian alliance that has more nuclear weapons than it does.”

Politicians, military chiefs and industry leaders “can no longer afford to ignore the prospect of a full-scale invasion”, said the Daily Mail. In such a scenario, the US – Taiwan’s most powerful protector – may be forced to respond in its defence. It would “shake the foundations of the world as we know it and could well trigger a third world war”.

Middle East

Donald Trump hailed a “historic dawn of a new Middle East” when he agreed a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in October, but since then has been trying all he can to keep fighting from breaking out again.

Last week, Congress approved the repeal of sweeping sanctions against Syria, following the ousting of Bashar al-Assad and the historic visit of the country’s interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, to Washington.

The former rebel leader has accused Israel of fighting “ghosts” and exporting its crises to other countries after the war in Gaza. He has warned that persistent air strikes and incursions by the Israeli military into southern Syria “could lead us to a dangerous place with unknown consequences”, said The Guardian.

This has prompted Trump to issue a warning to Israel to cooperate with the Syrian leader, having previously vowed to use all his power to ensure the country recognises it has achieved “all that it can by force of arms” and begin an age of cooperation that may ultimately extend as far as reconciliation with Iran.

It is a head-spinning change of tone from this summer, when, for a few days, it looked as though the war between Israel and Iran would explode into an all-out regional conflict, dragging in the US and Western allies on one side, and potentially Russia and China on the other.

While both sides backed down following a frantic 24 hours in which the US launched air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, the threat from Tehran’s nascent nuclear programme remains “heightened”, said Paul Ingram, research affiliate for the Centre of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, told the The i Paper.

Claims by Trump to have eliminated the regime’s nuclear capabilities for the foreseeable future were quickly debunked by the Pentagon. And with Iran still holding 440kg of highly enriched uranium, “it all adds up to quite a dangerous situation where their capacity has been marginally degraded, but the incentives for Iran to go nuclear have gone through the roof”.

The weakening of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the fall of the Assad regime in Syria and the decommissioning of Hamas mean Iran has lost much of its proxy influence across the region. Combined with the short-lived Israel-Iran war “calls within Tehran to develop nuclear deterrence will have massively increased”, said Ingram.

North Korea

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung recently warned that the north and south of the peninsula are in a “very dangerous situation”, with an accidental clash possible at any time.

In comments quoted by Yonhap News, Lee said North Korea has refused to answer calls by Seoul to establish contact and at the same time put up barbed wire fences along the military border, something that has not been done since the end of the Korean War.

“There have been more than 10 border intrusions by North Korean soldiers this year,” said Reuters, “some leading to South Korean troops firing warning shots under an established protocol.”

Since the start of last year North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has slowly moved the hermit kingdom away from “the idea of a peaceful unification” with South Korea, said The Associated Press. South Korea has since scrapped a 2018 non-hostility pact aimed at lowering military tensions.

“Kim’s government has repeatedly dismissed calls by Seoul and Washington to restart long-stalled negotiations aimed at winding down his nuclear weapons and missiles programmes, as he continues to prioritise Russia as part of a foreign policy aimed at expanding ties with nations confronting the US,” said The Independent.

North Korea has sent thousands of troops and weapons to fight in Ukraine, a move that “has raised concerns Moscow could provide technology that strengthens Kim’s nuclear-armed military”.

In April, North Korea conducted the first test-firing of the weapons system of its new 5,000 tonne “Choe Hyon-class” destroyer, according to state media KCNA. The new warship can apparently launch nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, and that, security and defence analyst Michael Clarke told Sky News, “shows the level of their ambition”.

Around the same time, South Korea said its soldiers had fired warning shots at North Korean troops who had crossed the demarcation line between the two nations – some of whom were armed.

Dr Sean Kenji Starrs, lecturer in international development at King’s College London, told the Daily Mail that “the more likely scenario” than North Korea invading South Korea would be China “encouraging or pressuring” it to do so “in order to expel US troops”. That would “open a new front against the US so that China could more easily take Taiwan”.