Are we heading towards World War Three?

Against the backdrop of an escalating trade war between the US and China, Beijing has been quietly testing the resolve of Taiwan and its allies.

Earlier this month, the People's Liberation Army 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. In the words of the Chinese military, they serve as a practice run for a co-ordinated action that would "close in on Taiwan from all directions".

"Growing tensions between the United States and China", as well as "major wars in Europe and the Middle East" and "increasing cooperation among China, Russia, North Korea and Iran" all raise the prospect of a large-scale conflict among the world's major powers within the next 10 years, said the Atlantic Council.

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China

It has long been assumed that the greatest threat to geopolitical stability is the growing tension between China and the US.

Earlier this year, Singapore's prime minister, Lawrence Wong, warned that rising tensions between the world's two largest economies could see the world splitting into two blocs and forcing other countries to align with either superpower. This risked pushing the globe to "the brink of a third world war", the Straits Times reported.

While recent attention has been on an escalating trade war between the US and China, 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 who 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.

Last year, the top US military commander in the Indo-Pacific, Admiral John Aquilino, told the US House Armed Services Committee that China wants to build up its army "on a scale not seen" since the Second World War.

Over the past month, 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.

"China has been flexing its maritime muscle in the Indo-Pacific to send a message of supremacy to its regional neighbours, experts say. But it's also testing the thinking of a bigger rival further afield: Donald Trump."

Beijing and Washington have become "desensitised" to the risk these circumstances pose, said Foreign Policy, 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 in April 2023. It would "make the Russian attack on Ukraine look like a sideshow by comparison".

Russia

Trump ran for re-election with a promise to bring about a quick end to the war in Ukraine, and since entering the White House has repeatedly used the threat of the conflict escalating into World War Three as a way to get both sides around the negotiating table. But months of diplomacy, bullying and flattery appear to have yielded little progress, with Vladimir Putin continuing to stall on a meaningful ceasefire plan.

If anything, the Russian army seems intent on pressing home its battlefield advantage as it looks to launch its "spring offensive" in Ukraine.

The worry, said the Daily Mail, is that the current "hot war" – at present largely confined to Ukraine and the Kursk region in Russia – is "now threatening to engulf the entire European continent".

More than three years on from Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, "liberal-democratic" states across Europe "are in agreement", defence expert Francis Tusa said in The Independent: if Kyiv "loses its struggle against Russia, the latter may be emboldened to take military action against the Baltic states, Finland, or even Poland".

Many defence specialists agree the timeline for this is "within three to five years" and would force Nato into all-out conflict with Moscow, which could in turn call on allies from China, North Korea and Iran to join in a global war. North Korean troops have been actively supporting Russian forces since the turn of the year, with Ukraine now claiming "significant numbers" of Chinese mercenaries have also joined the fighting, AP News reported.

"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.

Middle East

At the end of March, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said he was "changing the face of the Middle East", as part of a "war of rebirth". "It is, in a sense, undoubtedly true", said CNN.

The ceasefire agreed between Hamas and Israel in January marked a reset for the region, following a tumultuous period that started with the militant group's deadly 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, followed by the invasion of Gaza, the significant weakening of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the fall of the Assad regime in Syria.

But what had been hoped would be the start of a long process of de-escalation in the Middle East turned out to be merely a short pause, before the resumption of fighting.

The war in Gaza, which Israel restarted last month, "looks increasingly like it will lead to occupation for months or even years to come". Israel now has troops in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza. CNN said it has "vowed to demilitarise huge swaths of all three – backed by an unquestioning ally in the White House".

With the Trump administration's support for Israel unwavering, the US has also launched a massive wave of air strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen, which are "key to a wider effort in the region against Iran and its proxies", said The Jerusalem Post.

Iran has "distanced itself from the Houthis", knowing that it is "playing with fire with the Trump administration". Washington has warned that Tehran could be held responsible for future attacks by the Yemeni rebel group.

The Iranian regime's "growing vulnerability" has alarmed its government, said The Washington Post, "stirring fears that its steadily escalating conflict with Israel could soon enter a more dangerous phase".

Tensions are already running "high" over Iran's nuclear programme, said Al Jazeera, "which critics fear is aimed at developing a nuclear weapon – something Tehran has repeatedly denied".

The US and UK are "increasingly concerned" that Russia is sharing secret information and technology with Iran, which could "bring it closer to being able to build nuclear weapons, in exchange for Tehran providing Moscow with ballistic missiles for its war in Ukraine", said Bloomberg.

Due to the "complex web of alliances and rivalries" across the Middle East, conflicts between Iran and Israel could see the US brought directly into the fighting, said The Independent. Trump has long been a vocal hawk against Iran, so his return to the White House has done little to temper concerns.

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 a symbolic yet nevertheless strategically important move, at the start of 2024 he announced that the hermit kingdom had abandoned "the existential goal of reconciling with rival South Korea", 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".

In recent months, Pyongyang has "cut itself off completely from the South, detonating the few roads and railways that kept the two connected while mining the frontier along the demilitarised zone", said the Daily Mail.

Dr Philip Shetler-Jones, Senior Research Fellow in Indo‑Pacific Security at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank, told the paper he was sceptical that Kim would seek to invade or strike South Korea on his own, while Dr Sean Kenji Starrs, Lecturer in International Development at King's College London added that "the more likely scenario would be China encouraging or pressuring North Korea to invade South Korea in order to expel US troops… to open a new front against the US so that China could more easily take Taiwan".