The notion of a "first" world war only came into being retrospectively, upon the outbreak of the second. Now, we are again moving "from a postwar to prewar world," Defence Secretary Grant Shapps said in January, before Iran launched its first direct attack on Israel, risking all-out conflict in the Middle East. Combined with the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, it's clear that the "potential for a spark that ignites World War Three already exists," said Deborah Haynes, the security and defense editor at Sky News.
What did the commentators say?
A third world war will only really "come into existence when people subjectively agree that it has," said Gavriel Rosenfeld in The Washington Post shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "So long as the conflict remains limited to its present parameters, naming it will continue to be a partisan fight driven by fears and fantasies."
But to "compartmentalize" the conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and the Middle East, and the Chinese aggression in the South China Sea, would be a mistake, said Eliot A. Cohen at The Atlantic. Just as in the lead-up to World War II, it was a mistake to treat Italian, Spanish, German and Japanese conflicts as "unconnected events."
That world war, said Bret Stephens at The New York Times, "didn't so much begin as it gathered, like water rising until it breaches a dam." The "usual date" cited for the start of the global conflict is September 1, 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, but that was "just one in a series of events that at the time could have seemed disconnected." And just like those in the 1930s, we too "have been living through years of rising waters."
What next?
Drawing parallels between the lead-ups to the first two world wars may be overblown. But this moment "eerily evokes the dynamics of summer 1914," said David Ignatius, a columnist at The Washington Post, "when a war that every power sought to avoid suddenly appeared inevitable, with consequences that no one could predict." | 
