Are we close to World War Three?

Major Western powers have warned Iran not to attack Israel amid concern they could be drawn into a wider war in the Middle East that pits them against Russia and China.

Politico reported that "fears are growing" of an "imminent" Iranian attack on Israel in retaliation for the assassination of Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran late last month.

Tehran has rejected calls from the leaders of the US, UK, France, Germany and Italy to "stand down", prompting Israel to put its military on high alert on Monday night.

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It comes less than a month after the new head of the British Army, General Sir Roly Walker, warned that Britain must be ready to fight a war in three years' time in the face of growing threats from an "axis of upheaval" led by Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

It is a "deliberately stark judgment", said The Guardian, "based on China's hostility towards Taiwan, Iran's nuclear ambitions and Russia's militarisation as demonstrated by its invasion of Ukraine".

It's all part of a "dangerous new chapter" for the world, said military historian Richard Overy in The Telegraph. The "growing division between the democratic West and the arc of authoritarian states across Eurasia" could tip over into World War Three.

Middle East

With Israel already at war in Gaza, there is concern that any retaliation to last month's assassinations, from either Iran or its Lebanese ally Hezbollah, could "spark a wider regional war and potentially draw in the US in support of its ally", reported Al Jazeera.

Several European countries have urged their citizens to leave Lebanon due to fears that Hezbollah could play a "key role" in Tehran's retaliation and spark a "serious response" from Israel, Politico said.

The New York Times reported Israel's military was at "peak readiness" on Monday as it "girded for an expected retaliatory attack from Iran and its regional proxies". The US military was moving a guided-missile submarine into the region as part of a naval strike group deployed to the Mediterranean, with a White House spokesman citing US intelligence that suggested it was "increasingly likely" that the attack on Israel would come within days.

While there is still a desire on both sides to avoid direct fighting between Israel and Iran, conflict between Iran's proxy Hezbollah and Israel looks increasingly likely.

This would be a "calamity" for both sides, said The Guardian, and almost certainly draw Iran into direct conflict with Israel.

Iran is Hezbollah's key backer and any conflict between Lebanon and Israel would likely begin a widespread war across the Middle East due to its "complex web of alliances and rivalries", said The Independent. Any direct conflicts between Iran and Israel could then see the US brought directly into the fighting.

Russia

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 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."

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," he has said.

In March, a Russian cruise missile violated Nato airspace less than a week after Putin warned that a direct confrontation between Russia and the Western military alliance would be "one step away from a full-scale World War Three", said Time.

But despite claiming the Kremlin could arm the West's enemies with long-range missiles if Ukraine uses Nato-supplied weapons to strike Russian territory, the Russian president has so far been reticent to follow up his words with actions, following Ukraine's surprise incursion into Russia last week.

Putin's "embarrassing failure" in Kursk comes in the wake of other "recent humiliations" said Sergey Radchenko, professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, in The Guardian.

This has led to fears he could be forced to escalate the war elsewhere and by more extreme means to regain the initiative and save face back home.

If Putin ultimately prevails in Ukraine, he will "almost certainly try his luck" in the Baltics, said Dominic Waghorn, Sky News' international affairs editor – "because he will assume the alliance is too spineless to stop him". That view would likely be reinforced if Donald Trump were to carry through with his threats to pull America out of Nato if he wins the US presidential election in November.

China

It has long been assumed that the greatest threat to geopolitical stability is the growing tension between China and the US in recent years, most notably, over Taiwan and the question of its sovereignty.

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 and its ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which it has denounced as dangerous separatists, but who won an unprecedented third term earlier this year. At the same time, the US has ramped up its support – financially, militarily and rhetorically – for Taiwan's continued independence.

Earlier this year, the top US military commander in the Indo-Pacific said that Beijing is maintaining its goal of being able to invade Taiwan by 2027. Admiral John Aquilino told the US House Armed Services Committee that China wants to build up its People's Liberation Army (PLA) "on a scale not seen" since the Second World War.

The year 2027 is seen as "magical" because it marks the centenary of what was to become the PLA, said Robert Fox in the London Evening Standard. The idea that this anniversary could coincide with a serious military operation by Beijing has become a "fixation" in Washington, said Defense News. It has "impacted the debate over China policy – a shift from the long term to the short term" while also helping to steer billions of dollars towards US forces in the Pacific.

Foreign Policy said Beijing and Washington have become "desensitised" to the risk these circumstances pose, and in the "militarisation of foreign policy and the failure to grasp the full significance of that militarisation, the pair are one accident and a bad decision removed from a catastrophic war". 

Any invasion "would be one of the most dangerous and consequential events of the 21st century", said The Times last April. It would "make the Russian attack on Ukraine look like a sideshow by comparison".

Human costs 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 in 2019 broke down over disagreements about international sanctions on Pyongyang, Kim Jong Un has "focused on modernising his nuclear and missile arsenals", said 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 he announced that the hermit kingdom had abandoned "the existential goal of reconciling with rival South Korea", said The Associated Press.

While no direct military action has been launched from North to South since then, there are signs tensions are gradually rising. The two sides were recently involved in a "tit-for-tat" balloon war in recent weeks, said The Independent, with North Korea floating 200 balloons filled with rubbish and waste in June. That was in response to "activists" from the South, who have been sending balloons "carrying propaganda material about their democratic society and memory devices with K-pop music videos", into the North.

The South has since scrapped a "2018 non-hostility pact aimed at lowering military tensions", the paper added, indicating the "psychological warfare" had "tipped over into real escalation".

The scrapping of that pact has subsequently meant animosity rising across the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), where the South has been playing "propaganda and K-pop music to the North using loudspeakers", said the BBC. In June, its soldiers fired warning shots "by mistake" at North Korean troops who had inadvertently crossed the border, though this prompted "no notable movement from the North". However, the sister of Kim Jong Un, Kim Yo Jong, said previously that the North would launch "new counteractions" if the South did not cease with its actions along the DMZ.

The increasing hostility has already seen the US become further involved, conducting a "precision-guided bombing drill with Seoul" in June along the peninsula for the first time in seven years as a "warning against North Korea", said The Independent.