There is something ambivalent about the season of goodwill, as it usually triggers a splurge of journalistic predictions of bad things to come for the new year, more trouble and pestilence and worse wars. One point of comfort is that journalists, on the whole, make lousy prophets. So, in the ambiguous spirit of the season, let’s look at the places and occasions that could spark wider confrontation, even regional war or a global standoff.
Not that I can foresee a war in Europe, or anywhere else, of the kind gloomily forecast by Mark Rutte, the secretary general of Nato – “on the scale of war our fathers and grandfathers”. Whatever is in the works, it will not be anything like the great wars of the 20th century.
There will be no let-up in the intensity of combat and violence we are now seeing in Ukraine, Sudan, Rwanda and Congo, and Yemen. The standoff between Thailand and Cambodia seems tense as ever, and the ghastly bouts of civil strife and massacre in Myanmar are intensifying as the military junta finagles elections this spring.
A random spark in several of these conflicts could be the trigger for wider confrontation. As Rutte warned, we need to be prepared for war in order to prevent it.
Vladimir Putin has warned that Russia will continue to fight for outright victory in Ukraine, and if Europe wants war, he is ready. He is likely to provoke the European allies of Nato and in the EU at a number of pinch points – especially in the Baltic, the North Atlantic and through the Balkans. This could be the use of false flag incidents around the enclave of Kaliningrad, the wedge between Poland and Lithuania. This means dressing up a border incident as a piece of aggression by a Nato ally, such as those in recent months by covert Russian disruption of border patrols on the frontier with Norway and Estonia.
Nuisance patrols by Russian submarines to test the new Nato concept of the Atlantic Bastion security and early warning system are sure to increase, given the steady improvement of Russian submarine services deployed from the Kola Peninsula. They will be accompanied by more attention in British home waters as well as the Baltic by the ships and subs of the GUGI surveillance and sabotage intelligence service, especially their mothership, the Yantar.
The Kremlin will try to provoke us, while Trump’s America is acting nice to Moscow and quarrels with European allies. It will be tempted to act before European Nato can get its rearmament act together. A falling out between the US and a founding Nato ally, Denmark, over Greenland is an opportunity too good to miss.
The second major area of jeopardy for the United States is the American continent itself, where Trumpland has reclaimed hegemony in its new National Security Strategy, resurrecting the old continental claim by president Monroe back in 1823. It is not only a question of regime change in Venezuela, on which Trump has now set his heart, apparently. Any American incursion in Venezuela risks repeating the mistakes made with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. As the former general and secretary of state Colin Powell remarked, if you break a thing in these actions, you own the problem. There would be an urgent need to reform and run the security forces and the public administration, or face years of civil war, as in Iraq.
Action in Venezuela would accelerate the incipient instability across the region from Ecuador to Colombia and Guyana. Beneath the inflated Trumpian rhetoric, the key element is oil and the US becoming the dominant global oil power. This is sure to upset the big Opec powers and China, a big stakeholder in South America.
A fourth region, the Middle East, is a tinderbox of risk for further warfare – from Kurdistan in the north to the Arabian Peninsula, Sudan and Somalia across sub-Saharan Africa. Gaza is still a flashpoint, as are Yemen and Sudan. In South Yemen and Sudan, the proxies of the two biggest powers of the Gulf, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are in open war. The shaky regime in Iran could pick its moment to attack, directly on Israel or by working through proxies from Syria through to the RSF militia in Darfur and beyond.
“There is no sense of security across Sudan whatsoever,” says Pasquale Ferrara, who has designed Italian policy for the region for years, “but a huge amount of arms.” Fighting on the borders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo has strategic implications, given the contest for minerals such as rare earths and cadmium, between the agents of China, Russia’s former Wagner group, and powerful organised crime gangs.
In South and Southeast Asia, my fifth regional scenario, several standoffs have growth potential for conflict. Pakistan and India eye each other over Kashmir and Afghanistan, and India confronts China across their high mountain border. Cambodia and Thailand are not fully at peace, whatever Donald Trump may claim, though the trouble is unlikely to spread.
The sixth area of major conflict concern has to be China. In 2025, Xi Jinping and his regime have been the global grandmasters of the art of strategic ambiguity, outsmarting Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin where it counts. Next year, Xi might well calculate that Donald Trump is too distracted by Venezuela, Ukraine, Gaza and his own ego to react in time, if China were to try a decisive move against Taiwan by overt or covert means.
A mistimed and botched bid for Taiwan would provoke a huge reaction in all the major regional players, including India and Japan, Australia and America. In a worst-case scenario, it risks a truly global confrontation.
The risks of war and conflict are not just a matter of geography, the tinderbox of six fragile regions, nor of the old-fashioned means of warfare and diplomacy. There are the less obvious, usually unannounced, means of attack, through cyber, information and influence – the aspect of security and resilience for which the UK, for example, seems so woefully unprepared. Our governments just don’t want to think about it, and least not obviously or transparently so. Think of the bill for the cyber-attack on Jaguar Land Rover, now believed to be the work of a Russian proxy – a loss of £1.5bn to the company and £5bn for the national economy.
More concerning is what the business school geeks call a “black jellyfish” phenomenon – the terrible monster of the deep we want to ignore till too late and to our ultimate peril. The black jellyfish in warfare may be new forms of biological and chemical weaponry – something more lethal and elusive than the ricin, sarin, polonium and novichok we have seen deployed as terrorist tools in the past half-century. In the hands of the non-state cult member and fanatic, they could be the biggest threat of all.
