One Kremlin insider judged that Hamas’s decision to strike was influenced by the fact that the US was preoccupied with the conflict in Ukraine. In the same way, he said, Azeri President Ilham Aliyev had spotted an opportunity to take the disputed Karabakh region from Armenia because Russia, the Armenians’ main backer, was similarly distracted.
Indeed, the Israel-Hamas war serves as a reminder of how strategists in Washington, or indeed Beijing, can be caught by surprise. In an article published just before the attack and quoted often since then, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said, “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
A senior European diplomat who’s spent time in Israel agreed they never could have imagined the security apparatus there could be blindsided in the way that it was by Hamas, which is designated a terrorist group by the US and EU. After all, many policymakers working today grew up at a time where warfare felt more distant — something Bridgewater Associates’ founder Ray Dalio pointed out just after the violence broke out.
“The United States and its allies are facing an unprecedented period of volatility and complexity,” said Michele Flournoy, who was the principal adviser to the Defense Secretary during the Obama administration. “These challenges to the inherited rules-based order are driving us toward a more multi-polar and less integrated world.”
Asked specifically this week by reporters about NATO’s preparation for a possible third world war, its head Jens Stoltenberg said that he was focused on preventing the war in Ukraine from turning into a direct NATO-on-Russia fight, and that is why the alliance is increasing the military presence on its eastern flank. “We do this not to provoke a conflict but to prevent a conflict,” he said.
That’s evident to the western countries who are struggling to contain Russian misinformation efforts. Russian propagandists are seeking to play up the links between the world’s wars to convince the Global South in particular that the fighting in Ukraine is part of a broader shift in the global order, rather than just a war of aggression.
“The Third World War is already under way,” according to Fyodor Lukyanov, who advises the Kremlin on foreign policy. “It’s not like the two first world wars. We see a growing number of major regional conflicts. And these are not the last.”
Indeed, parallels to the violence of more than a century ago offer limited clues for the governments trying to game out how all those conflicts might play out.
Information warfare has transformed the nature of both attack and defense, while the advent of nuclear weapons helped has keep a lid on direct superpower escalation since the start of the Cold War.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin was issuing nuclear threats early in the invasion of Ukraine, but he dialed them down around the time that Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi urged him to back off.