It has long been assumed that the next world war would be sparked by “a sudden single trigger that would divide the world into opposing camps overnight”, said The i Paper. “But that is no longer how Western defence officials understand the situation.”
Instead, Nato officials and defence experts believe the world may be “edging towards a form of conflict that is already under way, even if not yet fully recognised”. From the Middle East to Ukraine to Taiwan, “crises are no longer isolated events” but “increasingly interconnected by allies and enemies sharing military capabilities, intelligence and motives”.
The “interconnectedness of the fighting” and “apparent collapse of the rules-based international order” have led some to suggest we could already be at the beginning of a third world war, said The Guardian. This might be jumping the gun, said the paper’s diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour, even if half of Britons polled in a recent YouGov survey thought World War Three was likely within the next five to 10 years.
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Middle East
Future historians will “look back” at the current US-Israel war on Iran as “the final catalyst for a third world war”, said Richard Shirreff, a former deputy supreme allied commander of Nato in Europe, in the Daily Mail earlier this month.
There’s a “growing sense in the Western military community” that the Iran war has “already spiralled out of control”, and if the US were to get “sucked” into a ground war in the Middle East, China and Russia would “waste no time” exploiting the situation. Beijing could “seize the opportunity” to launch its “longed-for invasion of Taiwan, perhaps as soon as 2027”. That’s World War Three “in anyone’s book”, and “all the major powers would go into the conflict possessing weapons that could kill billions”.
Those who see “the spectre of a third world war are both right and wrong”, said Doug Stokes, head of the School of International Relations at Modul University Vienna, in The Spectator. They’re “wrong if they mean a singular, cataclysmic escalation”, but they’re “right” if they mean that a “structural contest between the United States and a loose Sino-Russian-Iranian axis” is “well under way”, and “fought through proxies, economic leverage, and the systematic contestation of strategic geography”.
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. But Tehran’s ability to retaliate against Gulf states and Western bases in the region, and effectively block the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz, has surprised many and left Donald Trump with a difficult decision to either escalate fighting further – which could draw in Iran’s most important ally, China – or seek a face-saving off-ramp to end the conflict.
Russia
Russia was seen as the biggest threat to peace in Europe, according to Politico’s poll of more than 2,000 people in the US, Canada, UK, France and Germany carried out in February.
Addressing the Munich Security Conference last month, Keir Starmer said Europe “must be ready to fight” Russia “if necessary” as the threat continues to grow. The UK PM warned “Russia’s rearmament would only accelerate” once a peace deal in Ukraine is agreed and that “we must answer this threat in full”.
This echoed recent comments by Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, who said the West “must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents and great-grandparents endured”.
As Vladimir Putin continues to stall at peace talks, he has also warned that he is ready to fight a war with Europe if necessary. Were this to happen, it would likely come through the provocation of Nato’s European allies at a “number of pinch points – especially in the Baltic, the North Atlantic and through the Balkans”, said The Independent.
Moscow has already begun testing Nato defences and resolve with a series of airspace incursions into Estonia, Romania and Poland.
Last month Russian balloons entered Lithuanian and Polish airspace from Belarus, which is closely allied to the Kremlin. The Institute for the Study of War think tank said Moscow is “intensifying its covert and overt attacks against Europe” in preparation “for a possible Nato-Russia war in the future”. The latest moves are “very likely part of Russia’s broader Phase Zero effort”.
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.
China
It has long been assumed that the greatest threat to geopolitical stability is rising tension between China and the US, with Taiwan expected to be at the centre of any future military confrontation.
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.
Last 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.
China has also “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.
But, with the US distracted in the Middle East, “what everyone’s looking at is whether China sees an opportunity” and goes for Taiwan soon, said Wintour in The Guardian. “That would be how we got to a world war,” he said. The Chinese “insist that’s not the case, and they certainly won’t do it for a year or two, but it must be tempting for people in the Chinese government if they are intent on recapturing Taiwan”.
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 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”.
With Donald Trump focused on the Middle East, Latin America and securing peace in Ukraine, Xi Jinping might well calculate the US president is “too distracted” to “react in time, if China were to try a decisive move against Taiwan by overt or covert means”, said The Independent.
Invading Taiwan would “trigger western sanctions far worse than any-thing imposed on Russia”, wrote Geoffrey Cain in The Spectator, and “after what happened to Khamenei”, Beijing “knows that escalation does not end with sanctions”. To “survive” sanctions, China “needs countries willing to sell it oil off the books”, help it “move money past western banks and provide political cover”, Iran and Russia were “supposed to be those countries”, so Xi may need to think again.
North Korea
At the start of the year, North Korea fired several ballistic missiles from its capital Pyongyang towards the sea off its east coast. It came less than a day after its leader Kim Jong Un called on munitions factories to more than double their capacity to produce tactical guided weapons.
Kim has “made a series of visits to factories that build weapons, as well as to a nuclear-powered submarine, and has overseen missile tests”, said CNN, all ahead of the Ninth Party Congress of the Workers’ Party, to be held in the capital this month, where he is expected to “set out major policy goals”.
Since the beginning of 2024, Kim 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”.
Last spring, 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 rather than North Korea invading South Korea “the more likely scenario” 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”.