Are we heading for World War Three?

Doomsday pendulum swings back towards Europe as Kremlin warns of 'inevitability' of conflict with Nato if troops are sent to Ukraine

A black and white illustration included images of President Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un
The Indo-Pacific and Ukraine are not the only potential flashpoint involving major powers around the globe
(Image credit: Illustrated/Getty Images)

The Kremlin has responded to a leaked recording of a high-level meeting of German military officers by claiming it is proof Nato is planning to attack Russian territory.

The leak has caused "uproar in Berlin, possible harm to its support for Ukraine and accusations that this is all part of Russian President Vladimir Putin's years-long 'information war' against the West", said NBC News.

It comes less than a week after Moscow warned that conflict between Russia and Nato would be "inevitable" if Emmanuel Macron carried through with his threat to send European troops to fight in Ukraine. 

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Speaking at the opening of a conference of 20 leaders in Paris designed to speed up the supply of weapons and financial aid to Kyiv, the French president said sending Nato soldiers to Ukraine would ensure "our collective security, for today and tomorrow" and "could not be ruled out". Macron dismissed fears this could lead to an escalation with Moscow, but he was "unusually clear that a consensus existed that Russia would seek to attack other countries in a few years", said The Guardian's diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour.

The escalating rhetoric chimes with warnings that the West and Russia are "heading for an apocalyptic confrontation", said Michael Day on the i news site. And UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps has said that the world could be engulfed by wars involving China, Russia, North Korea and Iran in the next five years – a situation made all the more perilous as most of these powers have nuclear capabilities.

Russia

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022, has been described as "more dangerous than anything Europe has seen since the end of World War II" by Politico.

It has triggered the "worst crisis in Russia's relations with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis", said the Daily Mail. "Even talk of a confrontation between Russia and Nato – a Cold War nightmare of leaders and populations alike – indicates the dangers of escalation as the West grapples with a resurgent Russia 32 years after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union."

Now two years on, European leaders are thought to be tiring of the conflict and resistance is growing in Washington to open-ended financial support. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that failure to fend off Russia's aggression could spiral into confrontation with Nato and that "certainly means the Third World War", said The Times.

If Putin remains "undeterred" in Ukraine, he will "almost certainly try his luck" in the Baltics, said Dominic Waghorn, Sky News's international affairs editor – "because he will assume the alliance is too spineless to stop him". That view will be reinforced if Donald Trump carries through with his threats to pull America out of the military alliance if he wins in November.

Last week's leak of high-level German military discussion is just the "latest sign that Putin is exploiting divisions within Nato as the transatlantic alliance grapples with the prospect of a second Trump presidency and waning support for Ukraine", said NBC News.

Middle East

For decades, Israel and Iran have been engaged in a "shadow war", said Foreign Affairs. Now, the war in Gaza is "disrupting their already delicate calculus, and the longer the conflict continues, the more it will reduce the incentives for moderation and raise the risk of Israeli-Iranian conflict".

Attacks by Iran's proxy groups, most recently on ships in the Red Sea, are part of wider efforts by Tehran to oppose Israel, end its war in Gaza and supplant the US (and, to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia) as the foremost power in the Middle East.

Iran's allies and proxies have so far "been undeterred by the huge show of US force in the region", said Alex Rossi, Sky News' international correspondent, but Washington must "decide whether hostilities have now crossed the Rubicon", an Atlantic Council expert said.

Last month's drone attack by Iran-proxy group Islamic Resistance in Iraq on a US military base in Jordan sparked calls from Republicans for direct strikes on Tehran. It led Donald Trump to write on his Truth Social network: "We are on the brink of World War Three."

A confrontation between the US and Iran would "divide, perhaps permanently", Western democracies that would back Washington (such as the UK) and those who "might sensibly prioritise renewed diplomatic outreach to Tehran", said Simon Tisdall in The Guardian.

It would prolong Israel's war in Gaza, almost certainly trigger a Hezbollah attack on Israel, destabilise friendly regimes in Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf, escalate violence in Iraq and Syria, help China realise its anti-democratic geopolitical ambitions and aid Russia in justifying the Ukraine war, said Tisdall.

Another concern, Ali Vaez, an Iran expert at Crisis Group, told the Financial Times, is that "Tehran will turn to another avenue to up the stakes with the US – its nuclear programme".

China

The greatest threat to geopolitical stability has long been assumed to be the growing tensions between China and the US over the past few years. Despite a slight thawing that led to a ground-breaking meeting between leaders Xi Jinping and Joe Biden in November, core issues between the two – most notably, over the island of Taiwan and the question of its sovereignty – remain.

Beijing sees Taiwan as an integral part of a unified Chinese territory. It has, in recent years, adopted an increasingly aggressive stance towards the island and its ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which it has denounced as dangerous separatists. At the same time, the US Biden has ramped up its support – financially, militarily and rhetorically – for Taiwan's continued independence.

In response to the DPP's re-election in January for an unprecedented third term, China's Communist Party has "sharpened its rhetoric towards Taiwan, raising the pressure on the country as its president-elect Lai Ching-te prepares to take office in May", said the Financial Times. China's most senior official in charge of Taiwan policy after President Xi Jinping told an annual meeting of the Communist Party that Beijing "must resolutely fight 'Taiwan independence' separatism" and "further grasp the strategic initiative to achieve the complete unification of the motherland".

While most experts agree an imminent escalation is not on the cards, any invasion "would be one of the most dangerous and consequential events of the 21st century", said The Times. It would "make the Russian attack on Ukraine look like a sideshow by comparison".

The devastating human cost aside, a military conflict between the world's two biggest economies would lead to "a severing of global supply chains, a blow to confidence and crashing asset prices", said The Guardian's economics editor Larry Elliott. "It would have catastrophic economic consequences, up to and including a second Great Depression."

North Korea

Since talks with Trump broke down in 2019 over disagreements about international sanctions on Pyongyang, Kim Jon Un has "focused on modernising his nuclear and missile arsenals", according to Sky News.

In his New Year's Eve address, he warned that the actions of the US and its allies have pushed the Korean peninsula to the brink of nuclear war, and announced that the hermit kingdom had abandoned "the existential goal of reconciling with rival South Korea", said The Associated Press.

"We believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war," Robert L. Carlin and Siegfried Hecker wrote at 38 North, a website that tracks developments on the peninsula.

Alongside its military development, Kim has been "chumming up to Russia and remaining on the right side of China", said The Times's Asia editor Richard Lloyd Parry.

This has "added greatly to tension on the peninsula", said Lloyd Parry, and increased the chances of so-called miscalculation – "where one side assumes that the other is about to attack, and goes first".

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