There are 6,000 kilometres between the cities of Lviv, in the far west of Ukraine, and Lahore, in eastern Pakistan. Inbetween, there isn’t a single country at peace.
That journey would take you from Eastern Europe to South Asia – across war-torn Ukraine, through western Russia, then into Azerbaijan, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Each of those countries is engaged in a full-scale war right now, except for Azerbaijan, which is one of more than a dozen countries Iran has targeted with missiles as it lashes out in retaliation for the U.S.-Israeli assault that began on Feb. 28.
The entire Middle East has been on fire since that moment. Four weeks later, the war on Iran has shifting aims and no apparent end in sight – despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s assertions that his administration is negotiating with a senior Iranian official, a claim Tehran has denied. The conflict has already caused one of the largest disruptions to the global economy in decades, and a secondary front in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy force, has rapidly expanded into a full-scale war of its own.
Though Canada remains an oasis of relative peace, there’s a growing sense that war is spreading everywhere else.
In addition to the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, hundreds have been killed in cross-border fighting between Pakistan and Afghanistan that erupted last month after Islamabad accused Afghanistan’s Taliban government of harbouring militants involved in a series of suicide attacks on its territory. Meanwhile, horrific, years-long civil wars still rage in Yemen and Sudan, and China continues to probe the air-defence zone around Taiwan, the U.S. ally that Beijing considersa renegade province.
It’s not a Third World War − not yet, and not as long as the various conflicts remain separate. But we live in a world that’s increasingly at war, and geopolitical analysts are worried by the growing number of connections between the conflicts.
Historian Margaret MacMillan, who has made a career of analyzing the origins of great wars, says the eruption of the conflict in the Middle East reminds her in some ways of how the First World War broke out in 1914. She sees weak leaders choosing war – even though other options were available to them – because they thought it would result in a swift victory and resolve multiple problems at once.
“Yet again, those who start wars often don’t have a very clear idea of how they’re going to end. And they often think that battles will settle everything − and they don’t necessarily,” said Prof. MacMillan, emeritus professor of history at Oxford University and the author of The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914.
It’s a lawless new era that Prof. MacMillan says can be traced back to the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, when Mr. Putin made it plain that the old international order no longer applied. It’s an example that Mr. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu followed when they launched their attack on Iran – which commenced with the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – without consulting their allies, let alone the United Nations Security Council.
“We’re back again with predatory nations breaking all the rules and getting away with it,” Prof. MacMillan said.
It’s not just the arc from Ukraine to Pakistan either. Another theoretical journey would take a traveller from Yemen, in the far south of the Arabian Peninsula, all the way through the Middle East and the Caucasus region to Northern Europe and the newly fortified border between Russia and Finland – which joined NATO three years ago as threats mounted – and then all the way across the expanse of Russia to the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas. Again, they would find nowhere fully at peace.
Analysts say it’s a state of affairs we’ll likely have to get used to, at least as long as strongmen such as Mr. Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping – among others – are in their posts. “You have a world in which there’s a critical mass of leaders who define their borders not in national terms but in civilizational terms,” said James Dorsey, senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. The result, he said, is a time in which “might makes right and international law is no longer a criteria.”
It’s noteworthy that Mr. Putin and Mr. Netanyahu continue to lead their countries despite arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court. Both stand accused of war crimes allegedly committed by the armies they’ve sent into battle.
Meanwhile, the U.S. under Mr. Trump “no longer seems to feel any need to justify what it’s doing. It does what it does because it can,” Prof. MacMillan said. “The ignoring of international law is much more open now than it would have been a few years ago, and that doesn’t help any of us in the long run.”
Mr. Trump’s war on Iran – which German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, among others, has branded as illegal – has rapidly expanded beyond the quick and contained conflict that the White House hoped would culminate with the collapse of the Islamic Republic.
The number of countries that have seen their territory or military bases targeted during the month-old Middle East war stood at 17 as of Friday. Iran’s move to close the Strait of Hormuz has further spread the economic pain around the world, with oil prices shooting past US$100 a barrel for much of the past two weeks. That led Mr. Trump to call on his country’s erstwhile allies in NATO to send warships to escort oil tankers through the strait.
John MacDougall/AFP via Getty Images
But NATO is focused on the war in Ukraine and defending its eastern front against the possibility of further Russian aggression. So far, NATO is slow-playing the request from Mr. Trump, with Finnish President Alexander Stubb suggesting last week that it was “a really good idea” for NATO leaders to tie any help they give Mr. Trump in the Strait of Hormuz to a resumption of U.S. military assistance to Ukraine. That would further link two conflicts that are already worryingly intertwined.
The biggest winner from the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran has been the Kremlin, which has been receiving an unexpected windfall of US$150-million per day in oil revenues ever since the Trump administration lifted some sanctions on the sale of Russian crude in an effort to keep pump prices under control.
At the same time, Russia is enjoying the deepening divisions in NATO and watching with satisfaction as the U.S. hastens the delivery of Patriot anti-missile systems to the Middle East to help defend its allies from Iranian attacks. Every Patriot missile fired to protect Israel or one of the Gulf Arab countries is one that can’t be used to defend Ukrainian cities from Russia’s nightly drone and missile attacks.
The connections between the two wars were made plainest on March 18, when Israeli warplanes targeted the Caspian Sea port of Bandar Anzali. The Iranian naval base was once a key conduit for sending Iran’s Shahed drones to Russia for use against Ukraine, but more recently saw Russia sending upgraded versions of the drones to its ally. Moscow has also provided Tehran with satellite imagery that has helped it target U.S. military bases around the Gulf region.
Ukraine, for its part, has deployed more than 200 military advisers to the Middle East to help direct air defences, sharing its unhappy experience with Shahed drones. That prompted Iran to threaten direct strikes against Ukraine, saying Kyiv had made itself a participant in the war.
“We could be sitting on a powder keg in the sense that we don’t want to call it a world war, but when you look at the constellation of alliances around Ukraine and around Iran, you do see that these theatres are interconnected, and that what happens in one theatre will have direct ripple effects on the other one,” said Jaroslava Barbieri, a Ukraine expert at Chatham House, a London-based research institute. “It would be naive to see them as distinct theatres.”
Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
The civil wars in Yemen and Sudan, meanwhile, have long been international conflicts. In Yemen, Saudi Arabia has backed the official government through more than a decade of war, while Iran supports the Houthi rebels – a Shia militia like Hezbollah – that control the west of the country, and the United Arab Emirates funds another separatist group that hold power in the southwest.
In Sudan, half a dozen countries – including the aforementioned three – have fuelled a three-year-old conflict that has killed more than 150,000 people and driven 11 million others from their homes.
These are the types of wars that the U.S., NATO or the UN Security Council might once have been expected to intervene in to force an end to the bloodshed. But the U.S. is no longer interested in playing the role of “global policeman,” a shift that dates back to Barack Obama’s 2013 decision to stand aside when Bashar al-Assad’s regime crossed the supposed “red line” of using chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war.
Meanwhile, NATO is more divided than ever after Mr. Trump’s decision to slash U.S. military support for Ukraine and his angry denunciation of the alliance as “cowards” for not immediately responding to his call for help in the Strait of Hormuz. And the UN Security Council has always been powerless to act when veto-wielding members such as the U.S., Russia and China are among the belligerent parties.
Ian Bremmer, the president of Eurasia Group, a New York-based political risk research firm, said that while he didn’t see a global war on the horizon, it wasn’t hard to envision a world where more and more regional conflicts erupt and burn out of control.
“When the most powerful country in the world says: ‘I’m no longer interested in being global policeman, I’m not interested in free trade or international law or open borders,’ it creates a lot of capacity for rogue states, for anyone who wants to revise the global order,” he said.
What’s worrisome about 2026 is that the list of rogue states no longer solely includes such relatively minor players as Iran and North Korea. The countries now bent on remaking the global order include the U.S. and Russia, as well as Israel, another nuclear state.
There are also concerns that the conflict in the Middle East could destabilize the security situation in Asia. Growing worries over energy supply have already led to fuel-rationing measures, including shortened workweeks in India, Pakistan and across much of Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, Japan and South Korea have been forced to tap into their strategic oil reserves.
In addition to the economic disruption, there’s a sense that the U.S. has turned its attention away from Asia, redeploying Patriot interceptor missiles from South Korea – where they had been stationed to deter an attack by North Korea – to the Middle East.
The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group was re-positioned from the disputed South China Sea to the Arabian Sea ahead of the initial strike on Iran, and thousands of U.S. Marines, usually based in Japan, have since followed as Mr. Trump contemplates deploying ground troops to seize the banks of the Strait of Hormuz.
Analysts say one of the biggest determining factors in terms of whether the conflict continues to spread is if and how Beijing – and specifically Mr. Xi, who has reportedly ordered his military to be ready to take Taiwan by force as soon as 2027 – decides to capitalize on the weakened U.S. military presence in East Asia.
Thankfully, there are few signs of that happening so far – other than a single incident on March 14, when Taiwan reported a surge of 26 Chinese military aircraft and seven navy vessels around its territory.
“The Chinese are not trying to take advantage of what is happening. They’re not engaging in risk-seeking behaviour in Taiwan or the South China Sea. They’re focused instead on maintaining good relationships and positioning themselves as the long-term, more reliable partner,” Mr. Bremmer said. “If Xi Jinping wasn’t doing that, it would be a different conversation.”
In other words, it’s Mr. Xi – along with Mr. Trump, Mr. Putin and the world’s other strongmen – who will decide whether the wars continue to multiply. The UN, the ICC and other such institutions that were founded in the “never again” moment that followed the Second World War are unlikely to be factors in their thinking.
The biggest short-term risk, said Mr. Dorsey of the Rajaratnam School, is a further expansion of the Middle East conflict. Iran has yet to fully deploy its proxy Houthi militia in Yemen, which could enter the conflict by targeting shipping via the Bab el-Mandeb Strait at the foot of the Red Sea. That would exacerbate the world’s oil crisis by cutting off Saudi Arabia’s remaining oil export route. Saudi Arabia and the UAE could also lose the patience they have displayed so far in the face of Iranian attacks and join the war more directly.
Even in that case, Mr. Dorsey said he couldn’t see Iran’s new leaders agreeing to peace on the terms Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu are seeking. From Tehran’s point of view, they weathered the initial barrage, and they now gain leverage with each day the war continues and economic chaos spreads.
“They control shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, and there’s no easy way for Trump to change that. That, to them, is evidence that their strategy is working. So why would they suddenly capitulate?”
Iran’s leaders will also remember that negotiating with Washington has only led to surprise U.S.-Israeli attacks − twice in eight months − that were launched before any deal could be reached. And reaching a ceasefire deal could be complicated by Israel’s stated plan to seize and occupy southern Lebanon to keep Hezbollah at bay.
Prof. MacMillan said Mr. Trump now finds himself in a position similar to that of European leaders in 1914, with Israel playing the role of Serbia, which pulled its ally Russia into a war that was not in the larger power’s interests.
That war started that August and was supposed to be over quickly − possibly by Christmas. It ended up lasting until November, 1918.
“War has its own logic,” she said. “Once you start it, you don’t know where it’s going to go.”
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