Over the past half decade, the world as we have once known it has completely changed.  With the start of the Arab Spring movement, numerous governments have fallen out of power in the Middle East, and the transitionary period that has resulted has been nothing short of a disaster.  Many states have been faced with mass protests that they have attempted to put down with violence, an action that only serves to create more dissent.  Countries are being violently ripped apart – governments are unwilling to give up and citizens are unable to completely overthrow their former leaders leaving states in a seemingly unending state of war.  The constant power and ideological shifts have left many of these Middle Eastern countries open to radical new groups who each seek to create a state in their own image, sometimes at odds with the established world order, forcing international intervention, particularly in Syria and Iraq.

Within the same period, inter-state conflicts have been on the rise, with Israel and Palestine launching missile attacks against each other, and Russia’s invasion of Eastern Ukraine.  In these cases, international allies have become important and have created widespread webs of interconnection.  Allied countries must balance what is most important for their own state, with what is necessary to maintain stable relationships with friendly territories.  The fear that I have however, is that the number of conflicts across the world will rise to a point where this management will become too difficult to control, and certain allied countries will split up, potentially pitting themselves against each other.

I believe that the countries that will fall victim to this situation will not be the smaller ones engaged in the current conflicts, but the major powers who support opposing sides and who will step in to intervene when wars escalate out of their comfort zone.  The two most likely candidates in my mind to turn this series of mildly interconnected international conflicts into a full fledged world war are the United States and Russia, as they are already at odds with one another, but both want to protect their slowly dwindling sphere of influence.  The United States is no longer the world superpower that it once was coming out of the Cold War; China has begun to encroach on its Asian neighbours, and it has witnessed a dramatic economic rise that has placed the US on edge.  With Russia’s rapidly increasing movement into the Ukraine, and its allies in states like Syria, a US opponent, the United States’ involvement in many of the current international conflicts puts it directly at odds with Russia.  Russia is already of US influence in Eastern Europe, and is participating in Ukraine as an attempt to wrestle the country from the westernization that many former Bloc states are witnessing.  If Russia were to escalate its involvement in the Middle East to further reduction of Western (read: United States) influence, it would bring itself directly in US opposition.

Currently, the United States and Russia are on poor diplomatic terms, and if tensions continue to escalate in other areas of the world where these two nations exert influence, it is possible that they end up at war with one another.  If this occurs, many of their respective allies will be plunged into a conflict that encompasses the entire world.  While the US and Russia may be the primary actors, that is not to say other states, like China, or groups, like Al-Qaeda or ISIS, won’t try to wrestle more power for themselves as well.  Although this whole scenario is hard to imagine, the current power vacuum in many areas of the world may be too tempting for major nations to keep out of, and I believe that war could quickly envelop the globe, leading us officially into World War Three.