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 fighting force; the Houthi attacks on shipping through the Red Sea; the fall of the Assad regime in Syria; heightened Russian provocations against Western powers in the midst of its war on Ukraine, to test NATO's willingness to respond and sabotage our military capabilities before we do (see all those suspicious "random" fires at munitions plants and the like...); a US blockade in the Caribbean with illegal strikes on alleged drug boats that has culminated in a Trump-ordered extraction and arrest of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and the cowing of his leaderless regime into being a puppet of Secretary Marco Rubio's; the full Iranian-Israeli War in June 2025 that culminated with an American bomber mission targeting alleged nuclear development sites; a brief flare-up between India and Pakistan last May, and now, an apparent full war between Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban; and, most notably, a full war between Iran and a coalition of America, Israel, and a growing number of regional Arab powers and various Western powers, that is by now undoubtedly a full-scale war, sparked in part by the Iranian regime's massacre of tens of thousands of its own people.

    To summarise more succinctly: we have a full Russian war of aggression, an Israeli genocide war, various counter-Iran/AoR operations culminating in a full war against Iran, the fall of two dictators aligned with the Beijing-Moscow axis and the death of a third, and an array of 'smaller' bush conflicts tangentially related to the Russo-NATO conflict centered in Ukraine and the Middle Eastern war sparked by 7 October.

    The present war against Iran is open great power conflict, and Ukraine is in some ways a proxy fight for Western powers (to Ukraine itself, it is a legitimate and existential struggle for national sovereignty and for Russia it is a desperate nationalist fantasy). But, again, there are an array of smaller and less direct confrontations that I still categorise as part of this larger "soft" war between the Western powers, the free states of the Pacific, and (regrettably) the Israelis and the aligned Arab states on one side, and Russia, the Iranian regime, China, and various satellite dictatorships on the other. The toppling of Assad is one, the yoinking of Maduro another, the various US and Western seizures of tankers carrying oil to or from Russia  or other enemy powers a third. The Houthis, the Ukranian operations against Wagner in Africa, the Trump administration's imperialist pressure against Cuba...all of these are arguably fronts of a larger 'soft' war.

I think it's very possible that, if there is enough of a gap between the various interconnected great power conflicts of this decade and the eventual Chinese invasion of Taiwan and other free Pacific nations, historians will categorise the array of related 2020s conflicts and crises as a 'soft' Third World War, while the looming war over the Pacific becomes an open Fourth World War.