Has World War 3’s Prelude Arrived?

A growing collection of wars and military flashpoints involving several nuclear powers is raising concerns that miscalculation or escalation in one region could pull major powers into a far wider conflict.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has entered a “dangerous new phase” in which the threat of regional spillover is growing, U.N. Under-Secretary-General Rosemary DiCarlo warned Wednesday, according to the United Nations. The Middle East is simultaneously confronting the continuing U.S.-Iran conflict and renewed fighting in Yemen, while tensions involving China and Taiwan and nuclear-armed India and Pakistan remain potential avenues for another major confrontation, according to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

“It’s possible to consider that World War III has begun,” defense policy analyst and retired Marine Dan Grazier told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The big problem before World War II was there were all these separate conflicts that were going on at the same time, and it was only a matter of time before they all got linked together.”

The number of armed conflicts worldwide has reached its highest level since the end of World War II, according to the CFR. Roughly 620 American government officials, foreign policy specialists and academics responded to CFR’s 2026 Preventive Priorities Survey, which identified a Taiwan Strait crisis and clashes between Russia and NATO as scenarios with potentially severe consequences for the United States.

“I would characterize the current environment as extremely dangerous, in part because key players greatly underestimate the potential for disaster,” the director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute, George Beebe, told the DCNF. “The biggest problem is that many leaders in the West believe the key to avoiding war is to demonstrate our resolve to escalate the use of force against our adversaries. They believe that diplomatic compromise constitutes ‘appeasement’ that endangers us.”

The nuclear danger extends beyond the sheer size of the world’s arsenals.

Of an estimated 12,187 nuclear warheads worldwide at the beginning of 2026, roughly 9,745 remained in military stockpiles available for potential use, 4,012 were deployed with operational forces and as many as 2,200 were kept on high operational alert aboard ballistic missiles, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. All nine nuclear-armed states also continued modernizing and enhancing their arsenals during 2025, with most deploying new nuclear-armed or nuclear-capable weapons systems.

“The world is moving from unipolarity to bipolarity, with the only two great powers being the United States and China,” Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, told the DCNF. “It is difficult to draw a comparison to the periods before the World Wars because there are nine nuclear weapons states, and nuclear weapons significantly constrain the freedom of action of the great powers.”

Advances in military technology, weakening arms-control structures and heightened geopolitical tensions have increased the dangers of nuclear escalation and miscalculation, SIPRI Director Karim Haggag warned in the institute’s annual assessment.

Ukraine represents perhaps the clearest immediate danger of a regional war spilling across borders. Attacks have intensified, civilian casualties are climbing, and cross-border drone incidents and military activity near nuclear facilities are increasing fears of escalation beyond Ukraine, DiCarlo told the Security Council, according to the United Nations.

The confrontation did not develop in a vacuum. Ukraine’s Western alignment accelerated after the 2014 Maidan uprising, when President Viktor Yanukovych fled Kyiv following months of protests and deadly clashes before parliament voted to remove him from office, according to the Congressional Research Service. Moscow has long characterized the change in government as a Western-backed coup, while Washington and Kyiv reject that description and characterize the uprising as a popular revolution.

The United States was nevertheless deeply involved in Ukraine politically before and after Yanukovych’s removal. Washington had spent more than $5 billion supporting Ukrainian democratic institutions, economic development and civil society since the country gained independence, then-Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland said in 2014, according to the State Department.

NATO’s 32 military chiefs met in Copenhagen Sept. 18 and 19 to discuss strengthening the alliance’s collective deterrence and defense as well as continued support for Ukraine, according to NATO. CFR’s survey identified direct Russia-NATO clashes as particularly consequential because they could draw the United States into direct military conflict with Russia, according to the CFR.

“The Russians should recognize, after the better part of five years now, that they aren’t going to find a military solution in Ukraine,” Grazier told the DCNF. “The more these conflicts are going on, and you rattle off a big list of all the potential flashpoints, the greater the risk that … one of those is gonna push the snowball off the top of the hill, and then it’s just going to grow into some big rolling behemoth that’s just going to steamroll over all of us.”

The Middle East presents another web of potential escalation pathways. The United States formally told the U.N. Security Council that it began combat operations against Iran alongside Israel on Feb. 28, describing the fighting as part of an ongoing international armed conflict, according to a U.S. government letter published by the United Nations.

The conflict has also disrupted one of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints. Only two commodity vessels crossed the Strait of Hormuz on Monday compared with a pre-conflict average of roughly 125 large commercial ships per day, Reuters reported, citing preliminary shipping data.

Fighting in Yemen has added another potential pressure point. Houthi advances toward the Bab el-Mandeb Strait have made the area increasingly volatile while fighting has spread across several Yemeni fronts, U.N. Assistant Secretary-General Khaled Khiari told the Security Council, according to the United Nations.

Yemen, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan have proven that modern war has changed so much that military might may not be sufficient to end conflicts by conventional means anymore, Grazier said.

“In the 21st century, I don’t know that it’s possible for a conventional war to be won in a traditional way. It just doesn’t look like it’s possible anymore,” Grazier told the DCNF. “Ukraine is fighting Russia, the big Russian behemoth, and fortunately, the United States has not exactly unleashed the full military potential in Iran. But we did prove pretty conclusively in this conflict that you can’t wage wars from a distance, no matter how much the Air Force leaders and boosters try to convince policymakers that that’s true, and because we’ve seen this again and again, the United States, we lost in Iraq and Afghanistan; big conventional militaries were thwarted by basically tribal forces.”

The Houthis provide a more recent example of the difficulty conventional militaries have faced trying to translate overwhelming firepower into a decisive battlefield outcome. U.S. forces struck more than 1,000 Houthi targets during Operation Rough Rider between March and May 2025, but the campaign ended with an Oman-brokered agreement under which Washington halted its strikes and the Houthis agreed to stop targeting U.S. vessels, according to CENTCOM and the Omani Foreign Ministry.

More than a year later, the rebel movement is again demonstrating its staying power against substantially better-equipped opponents. The Houthis have seized additional territory along Yemen’s Red Sea coast, pushed against Saudi-backed government forces and launched ballistic missiles and drones at Saudi Arabia, while Riyadh has sought additional military assistance from its allies.

Africa presents another cluster of conflicts with potential consequences beyond the continent. Nearly 14 million people have been displaced by Sudan’s civil war and roughly 20 million are experiencing acute hunger, according to the United Nations. Al Qaeda and Islamic State affiliates have also made significant gains across the Sahel, expanding operations in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and toward West Africa’s coastal states, according to a U.N. Security Council report.

The instability also overlaps with growing competition over Africa’s strategic resources. The Democratic Republic of Congo supplied an estimated 73% of the world’s mined cobalt in 2025, while China remained the world’s leading producer of refined cobalt, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Washington has meanwhile committed billions of dollars to the Lobito Corridor linking Angola with the mineral-rich regions of Congo and Zambia, according to the State Department.

The Western Hemisphere has also become more militarized. U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro during Operation Absolute Resolve on Jan. 3, while Washington has since expanded counter-narcotics military operations across the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, according to the White House and U.S. Southern Command.

Cuba could become another flashpoint. The Army Reserve is examining whether it can provide military police, medical personnel and other support units to SOUTHCOM within four months, CBS News reported, citing an internal Army message and U.S. officials who said the request was connected to continued military planning involving Cuba. No deployment orders or military operation against Cuba have been publicly announced, while Trump said Tuesday that “freedom will be coming to Cuba,” according to the White House.

Asia has become an intricate spider web of alliances and rivalries. China is allied with Pakistan and North Korea, while the United States is allied with South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. The theater is teeming with activity similar to the system of alliances that preceded World War I in Europe.

“There is considerable risk of major conflict in Asia, some risk in Europe, and the continued risk of brushfire wars among the weak states that make up the Middle East,” Logan told the DCNF. “The United States should be passing the buck back to the Europeans in Europe and departing the Middle East posthaste to replenish US arsenals and focus on the Pacific.”

“So let’s say China, the Chinese decide to capitalize on the fact that the United States is distracted in Iran, and the Chinese leadership decides that this is the right moment to act against Taiwan. Well, what would the response be to something like that?” Grazier told the DCNF. “Because for years we’ve been thinking that the United States is going to hop in and get involved and try to thwart Chinese ambitions, but if the United States is kind of committed to Iran and the United States is short on the kind of long-range munitions that would be needed for a fight in the Western Pacific, then what does the United States do at that point?”

Those risks are not purely theoretical. Indian and Pakistani naval vessels collided in international waters earlier in September, prompting both nuclear-armed governments to summon each other’s diplomats during their first overt military confrontation since their four-day conflict in 2025, Reuters reported, citing the Indian and Pakistani governments.

India and Pakistan have fought repeatedly since the partition of British India in 1947, with the status of Kashmir remaining the central unresolved territorial dispute between the two countries, according to the Congressional Research Service. The rivals both tested nuclear weapons in 1998 and fought the Kargil conflict in Kashmir the following year, demonstrating that nuclear deterrence did not eliminate the possibility of conventional war between them, according to SIPRI.

That danger resurfaced sharply in May 2025 after gunmen killed 26 people, mostly tourists, in Indian-administered Kashmir. India blamed Pakistan-based militants and struck what it described as terrorist infrastructure inside Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, while Pakistan denied involvement in the original attack and retaliated militarily, Reuters reported, citing the Indian and Pakistani governments. Four days of fighting included missile, drone and aircraft attacks before the two governments agreed to a ceasefire on May 10, Reuters reported.

Avoiding a broader war will require governments to maintain channels for diplomacy even while strengthening mechanisms designed to prevent military accidents and uncontrolled escalation. Mapping potential escalation scenarios, rebuilding crisis-management tools and reassessing how nuclear and conventional military systems interact could help keep regional conflicts from crossing dangerous thresholds, according to SIPRI.

“I’ve been a military historian now for more than two decades, and one of the biggest conclusions I’ve been able to draw, devoting my adult life to the study, is to realize that war is pretty stupid, and most of the time, the winner of a war is not one of the actual participants,” Grazier told the DCNF. “War is very destructive, and it’s destructive to both sides. And a lot of times, the real winner of a war is a side that didn’t participate or didn’t participate that much.”