Perhaps World War III will not begin with a declaration of war. There may be no single morning on which humanity wakes to newspaper headlines announcing that the Third World War officially commenced at midnight. The more disturbing possibility is that historians looking backwards will eventually identify a period like the present and conclude that the war was already forming before most people understood what was happening. Separate conflicts were burning in different parts of the international system, each apparently containable, until gradually their edges began to touch. The image that comes to mind is a bushfire. Anyone familiar with Australian bushfires understands that the greatest danger is not necessarily the enormous wall of flame visible on the horizon. Fires can begin separately. One burns in one valley, another kilometres away. Embers travel ahead of the main front and ignite spot fires. Wind changes direction. What appeared to be several manageable incidents suddenly becomes a single fire complex moving according to its own frightening dynamics. Something resembling that process may now be occurring internationally.
Tom Switzer and Shane Cluskey, writing in The Spectator, ask whether the world is approaching World War III. Their comparison is not primarily with 1939 but with 1914 and Barbara Tuchman's famous The Guns of August. That is the more unsettling analogy because the First World War was not originally intended as a world war. A regional crisis became connected to alliances, mobilisation schedules, strategic fears and miscalculations until events acquired a momentum that political leaders proved unable to stop. That is worth remembering today because the international landscape is increasingly covered with fires.
The war in Ukraine remains unresolved. Russia has intensified attacks on Ukrainian cities, while Ukraine has demonstrated an increasing capacity to strike targets far beyond the immediate front. Switzer and Cluskey point to an extraordinary recent example: a Ukrainian drone reportedly struck an Iranian cargo vessel in the Caspian Sea that Kyiv said was carrying military equipment to Russia. Iran reportedly considered retaliating against a Ukrainian Black Sea port before deciding against it. Think about what that incident represents. Ukraine and Iran are geographically separate theatres, yet the military relationships created by the wars have begun connecting them. An Iranian ship allegedly assisting Russia becomes a Ukrainian target. An attack on that ship creates the possibility of Iranian retaliation against Ukraine. A European war and a Middle Eastern war suddenly acquire a common point of ignition. That is how spot fires join.
The Middle East is already burning fiercely. The American-Iranian conflict has produced precisely the kind of strategic consequences that should make everyone cautious about predicting where conflicts end. Iran has survived the attempt to break its regime and continues to possess substantial military capabilities and regional allies. The Strait of Hormuz has become a central strategic issue, while the Houthis retain the ability to threaten shipping through the Red Sea. The economic consequences extend far beyond the battlefield because war in the Persian Gulf does not remain conveniently confined to the Persian Gulf. Energy, shipping, insurance and supply chains transmit its consequences across continents.
More ominously, the wars compete for the same finite military resources. Weapons expended in Iran or supplied to Ukraine are weapons unavailable elsewhere, and elsewhere increasingly means China. This is where the bushfire analogy becomes especially useful. A government confronting one crisis normally asks whether it possesses sufficient resources to manage that crisis. In an interconnected international system it must ask a harder question: what happens if another crisis begins while the first one is still burning? Imagine that American weapons inventories remain heavily committed to Iran and Ukraine while China dramatically increases pressure against Taiwan. Beijing need not coordinate formally with Moscow or Tehran for this problem to arise. It merely has to recognise that American military resources are finite.
The Korean Peninsula supplies another potential ignition point. So does the South China Sea. India and Pakistan remain nuclear-armed adversaries. Yemen remains unstable. Israel's regional conflicts continue. The Spectator article consequently identifies potential escalation extending from Eastern Europe and the Middle East through South Asia and into East Asia. None of this proves that World War III has begun, and that qualification matters. Predictions of imminent world war have been made repeatedly since 1945 and have repeatedly proved wrong. Nuclear deterrence remains an enormous restraint upon direct conflict between major powers. Russia, China and the United States understand that uncontrolled escalation could ultimately destroy all of them. India and Pakistan have similarly demonstrated considerable restraint despite repeated crises since both became established nuclear powers.
The problem is that nuclear deterrence prevents some kinds of behaviour more reliably than others. It strongly discourages Washington from deliberately launching a strategic attack on Russia and discourages Moscow from deliberately attacking the United States. It does not necessarily prevent drone attacks, proxy wars, cyber operations, sabotage, economic warfare, attacks upon shipping or clashes between allies. Indeed, nuclear weapons may perversely encourage conflict below the nuclear threshold. If both sides believe the other will avoid escalation to Armageddon, there is considerable room in which to cause trouble.
The modern battlefield therefore has no neat geographical boundary. A computer intrusion launched thousands of kilometres away can damage infrastructure without a soldier crossing a border. Cheap drones can attack targets that once required sophisticated air forces. Commercial shipping can become an instrument of economic warfare. Satellites, undersea cables, communications systems and electrical infrastructure can all become targets. The embers, in other words, can travel enormous distances, and the deeper problem is that the old international order that contained these fires is itself weakening.
After the Cold War the United States enjoyed what Charles Krauthammer famously called the "unipolar moment." Russia was weakened, China was economically much smaller and America possessed overwhelming military, economic and diplomatic superiority. Western policymakers persuaded themselves that integrating Russia and China into the global economic system would gradually make them stakeholders in the Western-led international order. That expectation did not survive reality. Russia sought to restore influence throughout its former sphere, while China became economically integrated with the West without becoming politically Western. Instead, its growing wealth financed a formidable military expansion and an increasingly assertive claim to regional predominance. Switzer and Cluskey argue that the deterioration of Pax Americana long predates the present crisis.
This does not require accepting the comforting alternative that everything would be fine if only America reasserted itself. American intervention has itself contributed to instability. Since the end of the Cold War the United States has repeatedly resorted to military force, from Iraq and the Balkans through Afghanistan, Iraq again, Libya and the campaigns against Islamic State. The latest confrontation with Iran has imposed another enormous burden upon American military resources. We are therefore moving away from a world dominated by one overwhelmingly powerful state and towards something considerably more complicated. Russia remains a formidable nuclear and military power. China is an economic and increasingly military superpower. India is rising. Middle Eastern powers possess greater independence. Alliances and partnerships are shifting. Smaller states have access to drones, missiles and cyber capabilities that allow them to impose costs once available only to major powers.
The result is not necessarily a stable multipolar balance. It may instead be a period of experimentation in which everyone is testing everyone else. How far can Russia push, how far can Ukraine strike, how far can Iran retaliate, how much can America fight simultaneously, how much pressure can China place upon Taiwan, and how much disruption can proxies create without provoking direct retaliation? Every successful test changes the calculation behind the next one.
This is where 1914 becomes relevant. The lesson of 1914 is not the simplistic claim that history repeats itself. Germany today is not Imperial Germany, China is not Imperial Russia, and Taiwan is not Serbia. The circumstances are profoundly different. The similarity lies instead in uncertainty combined with confidence. Political leaders in 1914 did not generally desire the four years of industrialised slaughter that followed. They made decisions they believed were rational within the circumstances immediately confronting them. Governments mobilised because opponents mobilised. Alliances created obligations. Military plans operated according to timetables. Each decision altered the environment in which the next decision had to be made, and the catastrophe emerged from the interaction.
Tuchman's enduring insight was that supposedly rational actors can collectively produce an outcome almost none of them originally wanted. The Spectator authors appropriately recall Churchill's "terrible ifs." What if Germany had understood Britain differently? What if mobilisation had been delayed? What if one government had interpreted another's intentions correctly? We now possess our own terrible ifs. What if an Iranian action kills large numbers of Americans, or a Russian missile crosses into NATO territory and causes substantial casualties? What if Ukraine strikes something Moscow regards as existentially important? What if China chooses precisely the moment of maximum American military overstretch to move against Taiwan? What if North Korea interprets the distraction of the major powers as an opportunity? What if a cyberattack cripples critical infrastructure and its origin is wrongly attributed? None of those events guarantees world war. Any one of them might be contained, but bushfires become catastrophic when several adverse conditions occur simultaneously.
The danger is therefore not simply that one mad leader presses a button marked World War III. The more plausible route is cumulative escalation. One conflict weakens the resources available to contain another. One alliance commitment affects calculations elsewhere. One military action demands retaliation. One misidentified drone or missile produces casualties. One government decides that backing down would damage its credibility in every other confrontation. Eventually nobody remembers precisely which fire started first.
There is an understandable temptation to dismiss warnings of World War III as sensationalism. Humanity has lived beneath nuclear weapons for more than eighty years without destroying itself. There have been many terrifying moments before, from Berlin and Cuba to the Middle Eastern wars and Soviet-American confrontations. Prudence requires acknowledging that record, but prudence cuts both ways. Surviving previous crises does not establish that every future crisis will be survived. The international system is changing rapidly, conflicts are multiplying, military resources are being depleted and the old American-dominated order is eroding before any clearly stable replacement has emerged.
Perhaps World War III has not begun, and we should hope that it has not. But that may not be the most useful question. The more important question is whether the conditions are developing under which several regional wars could cease being regional. On that question there is considerably less room for complacency. The fires are burning, some are intensifying, and embers are crossing the firebreaks. The firefighters are becoming exhausted and their equipment is being consumed, while the wind is changing direction and nobody can confidently predict where the next fire will start.
World wars need not be planned; separate wars can simply join. If future historians ever write The Guns of August for the twenty-first century, the most disturbing possibility is that they will record that the warning signs were visible to everyone but that, like the statesmen of 1914, we continued to believe each individual fire could somehow be contained.
https://spectator.com/article/brink-world-war-three-guns-august/