Global conflict

Are we heading for a third world war - or has it started?

- Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor

In a week in which former allies in a fracturing globe separately commemorated the 80th anniversary of VE Day, the sensation of a descent towards a third world war draws ever more near. The implosion of Pax Americana, the interconnectedness of conflicts, the new willingness to resort to unbridled state-sponsored violence and the irrelevance of the institutions of the rules-based order have all been on brutal display this week. From Kashmir, Khan Younis, Hodeidah, Port Sudan and Kursk, the only sound is explosions - and the only lesson is that the old rules no longer apply.

Indeed, Fiona Hill, the policy analyst and adviser to the UK government on its imminent strategic defence review, argues that the third world war has already started, if only we would recognise it.

The fear of a runaway world in which no one is any longer in control is hardly new - the concept was the title of two Reith lectures, one in 1967 by the social anthropologist Edmund Leach and another in 1999 by the political philosopher Anthony Giddens.

But rarely has it been so clear that the rules-based world order created in 1945 is in headlong retreat.

The former Labour foreign secretary David Miliband put it well this week at Chatham House, saying: "I know people always say the world is changing, but this feels like a moment of genuine geopolitical flux, at least as significant as 1989-90, when the world transitioned from the Cold War to a unipolar moment. The Trump administration is symptom and cause of the changes under way. The problem is it's much more clear what we are inflecting from a world in which the US was the anchor of the global system - but it's not clear what we're inflecting to. I know there's a lot of talk about the idea of a multi-polar world reflecting a redistribution of the balance of power, but I find that concept conveys too much stability, too much security."