{"id":11903,"date":"2016-10-13T20:30:47","date_gmt":"2016-10-13T20:30:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/?p=11903"},"modified":"2016-10-13T20:30:47","modified_gmt":"2016-10-13T20:30:47","slug":"third-world-war-looms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/?p=11903","title":{"rendered":"Third World War Looms?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><code><script async src=\"\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js\"><\/script><br \/>\n<!-- www.deltanewsroom.com --><br \/>\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\" style=\"display: block;\" data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-2163942495525027\" data-ad-slot=\"1411897411\" data-ad-format=\"auto\"><\/ins><br \/>\n<script>\n(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\n<\/script><\/code><\/p>\n<p>At the risk of sounding a little foolish, there is, sadly, much evidence that World War Three has already arrived, though not quite in the way so many futurologists of the past imagined it, as a clash between superpowers, their tanks chasing each other across the North German plain.<\/p>\n<p>Nowadays, our planet is much more kaleidoscopic and asymmetric in its violence than that, and the world is pretty much in flames already, should we care to look. The question is whether all the present (relatively) little wars could actually mutate into, or trigger, a real superpower conflict involving the US, Russia and China, at the least.<\/p>\n<p><code><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.alternativeadvert.com\/show.php?z=30&amp;pl=11094&amp;ad_type=59&amp;rl=180\" width=\"300\" height=\"250\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/code><\/p>\n<p>We are probably not yet at the most dangerous pass since 1945: the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and the early 1980s felt more frightening in those terms, in truth much more than after 9\/11, traumatising as that event was. But we are certainly in risky, unstable, uncertain times.<a href=\"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/Russian-VS-USA.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-11904\" src=\"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/Russian-VS-USA-300x187.jpg\" alt=\"russian-vs-usa\" width=\"300\" height=\"187\" srcset=\"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/Russian-VS-USA-300x187.jpg 300w, http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/Russian-VS-USA-128x80.jpg 128w, http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/Russian-VS-USA.jpg 450w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>There are about 195 countries in the world. Only a dozen or so can be said to be properly at peace: Iceland, the world\u2019s most peaceful country according to the Global Peace Index, followed by Denmark, Austria, New Zealand, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Canada, Japan, Slovenia and Finland. A tiny proportion of the world\u2019s population reside in these outposts of calm. The list of conflicts, wars, civil wars, insurgencies and permanent states of terror is a much longer one, from the all-too-familiar agonies of Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, Boko Haram in west Africa, and Yemen through to less well-covered conflicts such as the drugs wars in Mexico and insurgencies from Burma to Armenia and Azerbaijan to (until recently) Colombia. Britain, one way or another, has been in some sort of conflict every year since 1914, with the sole exception of 1968.<\/p>\n<p>So the world <em>is<\/em> at war, and more so than at any point than in most people\u2019s lifetimes. It is a way of life for most of humanity. Each conflict is different, of course. Slogans such as the \u201cwar on terror\u201d or the \u201cwar on militant Islamism\u201d fail to capture this reality. After all, many of these conflicts \u2013 as we see graphically in Syria and Yemen, for example \u2013 are between different groups of militant Islamists, with the Sunni-Shia divide more or less visible. Closer to home, in Northern Ireland, some of the bloodiest moments in the Troubles came when armed Republicans fought armed Loyalists, rather than the security forces. The tendency with al-Qaeda and Isis is for semi-autonomous or autonomous groups, or just random disaffected individuals armed with only a light truck or a smuggled gun, to \u201caffiliate\u201d themselves, often after the event.<\/p>\n<p>The \u201cclash of civilisations\u201d, the famous phrase coined by Samuel Huntington a quarter century ago, has not materialised in the sense he envisaged \u2013 substantial blocs of nation states fighting conventional wars across \u201cfaultiness\u201d. Instead, we have these fragmented, chaotic, unpredictable sets of \u201cplayers\u201d that vary in size and potency from the United States of America to a lone maniac with a machete on a train in Germany, or gangs of drunken child soldiers in the Central African Republic. There are proxy wars which defy easy categorisation into a pattern of \u201cthe West versus the Rest\u201d. Where America wants to retain friendlier relations with Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose side is the US on in the proxy war between Tehran and Riyadh in Yemen? When the Hutu and the Tutsi attempt genocide, they do so for ethnic not geopolitical reasons.<\/p>\n<div class=\"dnd-widget-wrapper context-sdl_editor_representation type-video\">\n<div class=\"dnd-caption-wrapper\">Former Mi6 Chief says we\u2019re entering an era \u2018more dangerous than Cold War\u2019<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Even so, the immediate danger now is Cold War 2, much more than a \u201chot\u201d Third World War, though one could grow out of the other. The US-Russia relationship is on a pivot between progress and failure, more so than at any time since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Also unsteady are America\u2019s and Russia\u2019s respective relations with China, which, as has been true since the Sino-Soviet split in 1961 and Richard Nixon\u2019s historic visit in 1972, can be categorised, in Huntington\u2019s terms, as a \u201cswing superpower\u201d, and a better armed, active and richer one nowadays.<\/p>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js\"><\/script><br \/>\n<!-- www.deltanewsroom.com --><br \/>\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\" style=\"display: block;\" data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-2163942495525027\" data-ad-slot=\"1411897411\" data-ad-format=\"auto\"><\/ins><br \/>\n<script>\n(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\n<\/script><\/p>\n<p>When America and Russia cannot act together in the face of a common threat on the scale of Isis, then there is certainly little cause for optimism. Putin won his war in the Ukraine with the annexation of Crimea and the de facto capture of eastern Ukraine, on the very borders of Nato and the European Union. Perhaps, had Donald Trump not been so enchanted by Vladimir Putin, we would have heard more about that particular failing by the Obama administration in the presidential campaign.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"mediaembed\"><\/figure>\n<p>On that score, cosying up to Russia, President Trump might be better for world peace than the second President Clinton; but at what price? Trump has also made little secret of his essential isolationism, dismissing Nato and, implicitly, offering up the Baltic republics to Putin as a few morsels, as if they were not worth the bones of an American marine. Thus would Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania leave the European Union against their will and join a reborn Russian sphere of influence.<\/p>\n<p>Others \u2013 the central Asian republics for example, and Georgia (where Russia has already fought a war of aggression) \u2013 might not be far behind. A Cold War would see aggressive, steady Russian expansionism accelerate, in a way we haven\u2019t seen since the 1970s, or Hitler\u2019s opportunistic land grabs. In that way we could be living through something similar to the \u201csteps to war\u201d every school child learns that the world trod in the 1930s; appeasement feeding the appetite of the beast.<\/p>\n<div class=\"dnd-widget-wrapper context-sdl_editor_representation type-video\">\n<div class=\"dnd-caption-wrapper\">Russia\u2019s Foreign Minister says \u2018there are so many pussies around both presidential campaigns\u2019<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Or it could arrive more rapidly, this transition from Cold War to hot war \u2013 more like the way it did in 1914, almost out of a clear blue sky. There are plenty of corners of the world that replicate some or all of the features of the Balkans in the late summer of 1914: the Baltic republics, Korea, the South China sea, Ukraine and the Middle East are the more obvious ones.<\/p>\n<p>But a hot war would not mean Americans directly in hand-to-hand combat with Russians, either conventionally or through nuclear weaponry. The doctrine of mutually assured destruction still applies. More probable, as in the last Cold War, is that they will try to stay out and allow their proxies to fight the wars for them.<\/p>\n<p>Every conflict during the Cold War was fought by armies or insurgents working on behalf of the Americans, Russians, or, occasionally the Chinese. Sometimes the superpowers committed their own troops \u2013 usually the US, as in Korea (under UN auspices) and in Vietnam, though the Russians went in in force to Afghanistan in the 1979 invasion, their own \u201cVietnam\u201d.\u00a0But Russians and Americans rarely, if ever, faced each other. The mujahedeen that resisted the Russians occupiers and their puppet regime in Afghanistan? Armed and advised by the CIA via Pakistan, including one Osama bin Laden. Wars in Korea, Vietnam, Angola (where the Russians sent Cubans and the Americans backed South Africa), and between Israelis and Arabs were or all, more or less, proxy affairs, where locals or the allies of the superpowers lost many more civilian and military lives than did the Americans or Russians.<\/p>\n<p>The Second Cold War will most likely take on that sort of character, as it is already, but in more places, with more deadly weapons, more terrorism, a greater death toll, less respect for national borders and, thus, with more dangers of escalation attached. Let\u2019s hope Iceland manages to keep out of the way; few others will.\u00a0 Source: http:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/<\/p>\n<p><code><script async src=\"\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js\"><\/script><br \/>\n<!-- www.deltanewsroom.com --><br \/>\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\" style=\"display: block;\" data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-2163942495525027\" data-ad-slot=\"1411897411\" data-ad-format=\"auto\"><\/ins><br \/>\n<script>\n(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\n<\/script><\/code><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.alternativeadvert.com\/show.php?z=30&amp;pl=11094&amp;ad_type=59&amp;rl=180\" width=\"300\" height=\"250\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the risk of sounding a little foolish, there is, sadly, much evidence that World War Three has already arrived, though not quite in the way so many futurologists of the past imagined it, as a clash between superpowers, their tanks chasing each other across the North German plain. Nowadays, our planet is much more [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":11904,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[23],"tags":[1787,3121,1860,2340],"class_list":["post-11903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news","tag-china","tag-cold-war","tag-russia","tag-us"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/Russian-VS-USA.jpg","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4oswh-35Z","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11903"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11905,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11903\/revisions\/11905"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}