China, Russia, North Korea and the Middle East are all potential flashpoints

 

The situation tells of a "tragic and terrifying tale of global failure on the part of the US and its allies", reported the Wall Street Journal, as China, Russia and Iran step up their attacks "on what remains of the Pax Americana and continue to make gains at the expense of Washington and its allies around the world".

Middle East

With Israel's invasion of Gaza approaching its one-year anniversary, tensions in the Middle East now appear close to spilling over into Lebanon, following a series of increasingly deadly exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah.

So serious were the exchanges of fire this weekend, "it is hard to be sure that the two sides have not already crossed the threshold of 'all-out' war", said The Guardian.

The latest retaliatory wave of strikes was sparked by the extraordinary plot to blow up pagers and then walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah, killing 42 and wounding more than 3,000, an attack for which Israel is widely believed to have been responsible.

While Hezbollah is being "goaded" into an all-out conflict with Israel, Asher Kaufman, Professor of History and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, wrote on The Conversation, this would be "devastating" for both sides, said The Guardian, almost certainly drawing Iran into direct conflict with Israel.

Iran is Hezbollah's key backer and any conflict between Lebanon and Israel would likely set off a chain reaction along the "complex web of alliances and rivalries" across the Middle East, said The Independent. Any direct conflicts between Iran and Israel could then see the US brought directly into the fighting.

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", Bloomberg reported.

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.

Ukraine's surprise incursion into Russia in August sparked renewed optimism among Kyiv's allies but also fear that it could force Vladimir Putin to escalate the war elsewhere, and by more extreme means, to regain the initiative and save face back home.

Instead, Russian troops continue to make slow but steady gains in eastern Ukraine. As a result, The Washington Post warned Ukraine is at risk of "bleeding out". It "doesn't have enough soldiers to fight an indefinite war of attrition" and "needs to escalate to be strong enough to reach a decent settlement".

Ukraine is pushing to be allowed to use Western weapons to attack Russian territory, a move that risks direct confrontation between Russia and Nato which would, in the words of Putin earlier this year, be "one step away from a full-scale World War Three".

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.

Meanwhile, Moscow's "conventional and hybrid threats to US allies in Europe are intensifying by the day", said Dr Samuel Ramani in The Telegraph, and the danger of an "accidental conflict" in the lead-up to the US elections or their aftermath risks the "very worst" scenario: a "new world war".

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. Earlier this year, the two sides were involved in a "tit-for-tat" balloon war, 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.