How close are we to World War Three?

European allies have vowed to respond to any further Russian violation of Nato territory after three MiG-31 fighter jets entered Estonian airspace without permission last week.

It follows unauthorised drone incursions into Romanian and Polish airspace over the past few weeks, which prompted the Polish PM to warn his country was at its “closest to open conflict since the Second World War”.

Addressing an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on Monday, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper told Moscow it was risking a “direct armed confrontation” with the Western military alliance.

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Russia

Russia’s recent airspace incursions and a major military exercise in neighbouring Belarus have “stirred unease in European capitals amid mounting regional tensions and fears that Moscow is probing Nato’s defences”, said The Guardian.

With Vladimir Putin continuing to stall on peace talks as Kremlin forces make slow but steady gains in Ukraine, Nato and its members have adopted a more aggressive tone in a bid to get him to back down. In a statement on Tuesday, Nato said the violation of Estonian airspace was “part of a wider pattern of increasingly irresponsible Russian behaviour”, with actions that are “escalatory, risk miscalculation and endanger lives”.

For many Nato countries, “the idea that Russia’s expansionism could go beyond Ukraine is a hypothetical”, said Axios. But in Estonia and other “front-line” states, “that’s seen as a very real threat”.

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.

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.

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”.

Middle East

For a few days over the summer 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.

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 region has been in a state of chaos ever since Hamas launched its surprise attack against Israel on 7 October 2023. That led to the subsequent invasion of Gaza, weakening of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the fall of the Assad regime in Syria and the Israel-Iran conflict.

With the weakening of Iran’s proxy groups “the calls within Tehran to develop nuclear deterrence will have massively increased”, said Ingram.

At the same time, the formal recognition of Palestine by a host of nations including the UK, Canada, Australia and, most recently, France has drawn anger from Israel, stoking fears that it could retaliate by annexing parts of the West Bank, a move that would ramp up tensions in the region even further.

China

It has long been assumed that the greatest threat to geopolitical stability is rising tension between China and the US, which could force other countries to align with either superpower. This risks pushing the globe to “the brink of a third world war”, The Straits Times reported.

While recent attention has been on an escalating US–China trade war, most 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 and its ruling Democratic Progressive Party, which it has denounced as dangerous separatists, but which won an unprecedented third term early last 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 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.

But 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”.

North Korea

Since 2019, Kim Jong Un has “focused on modernising his nuclear and missile arsenals”, said Sky News.

At the start of last year he announced that the hermit kingdom had eliminated “the idea of a peaceful unification between the war-divided countries”, said The Associated Press. The South has since scrapped a “2018 non-hostility pact aimed at lowering military tensions”, The Independent said. This indicates the “psychological warfare” had “tipped over into real escalation”.

“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 a “Choe Hyon-class” 5,000-tonne warship it recently unveiled, according to state media KCNA. The new naval destroyer can apparently launch nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, which 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”.