A 'soft' Third World War
Part of me wonders if in the future, historians will categorise the 2020s as a "soft" third World War. Not the fully-open fighting of the first two but also far hotter than the Cold War between America and Soviet Russia. I am tempted to place the beginning of this at the very opening of the decade, with the Trump-ordered US strike on Iranian general and terror ringleader Qasem Soleimani on 3 January 2020, but either the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 or the Hamas attack against Israel on 7 October 2023 is perhaps a more logical starting point for what I now believe could probably be labeled an era of open great power conflict. Since the beginning of the decade, we have seen Russia instigate the largest land war in Europe since 1945; Hamas' attack on 7 October; the Israeli response that has escalated to a full genocide in Gaza, with related fighting in Lebanon seeing the gradual collapse of Hezbollah as a serious f...