Are we heading for World War Three?

China and Russia are attempting to create a "vision of an alternative world order" through their "club" of Eurasian countries.

Moscow and Beijing head up the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), which recently held its leadership summit in Astana, Kazakhstan, and both are pushing to "transform the grouping", said CNN.

The two superpowers want to progress the group, which includes Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and India, among others, from a "regional security bloc" to a "geopolitical counterweight" to the West. The group has already admitted Iran as a member last year, but is now poised to introduce Russia's key European ally, Belarus, which assisted in its invasion of Ukraine.

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The admission of Belarus perhaps shows the SCO has "broadened in geopolitical ambitions" and addresses the shared aim to "counter what they see as US 'hegemony'" and "reshape the international system in their favour".

The SCO summit comes shortly after Russia and China announced an agreement which would see them help each other in the event of aggression against either country. Meanwhile, Russia's President Vladimir Putin has also recently upped his rhetoric against the West, claiming the Kremlin could arm the West’s enemies with long-range missiles if Ukraine uses Nato-supplied weapons to strike Russian territory.

It's all part of a "dangerous new chapter" for the world, said military historian Richard Overy in The Telegraph, and the "growing division between the democratic West and the arc of authoritarian states across Eurasia" that could tip over into World War Three.

Russia

Russia's invasion of Ukraine triggered the "worst crisis in Russia's relations with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis", said the Daily Mail. "Even talk of a confrontation between Russia and Nato – a Cold War nightmare of leaders and populations alike – indicates the dangers of escalation as the West grapples with a resurgent Russia 32 years after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union."

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that failure to fend off Russia's aggression could spiral into confrontation with Nato. "And that certainly means the Third World War," he has said.

In March, a Russian cruise missile violated Nato airspace less than a week after Putin warned that a direct confrontation between Russia and the Western military alliance would be "one step away from a full-scale World War Three", said Time.

Then, in June, Andrei Kartapolov, the head of the Russian lower house of parliament's defence committee, said Moscow could reduce the decision-making time stipulated in official policy for the use of nuclear weapons if it believes that threats are increasing, reported Reuters.

If Putin remains "undeterred" in Ukraine, he will "almost certainly try his luck" in the Baltics, said Dominic Waghorn, Sky News's international affairs editor – "because he will assume the alliance is too spineless to stop him". That view would likely be reinforced if Donald Trump were to carry through with his threats to pull America out of Nato if he wins the US presidential election in November.

North Korea

Since talks with Trump in 2019 broke down over disagreements about international sanctions on Pyongyang, Kim Jong Un has "focused on modernising his nuclear and missile arsenals", said Sky News.

In his New Year's Eve address, he warned that the actions of the US and its allies have pushed the Korean peninsula to the brink of nuclear war. And he announced that the hermit kingdom had abandoned "the existential goal of reconciling with rival South Korea", said The Associated Press.

While no direct military action has been launched from North to South since then, there are signs tensions are gradually rising. The two sides have been involved in a "tit-for-tat" balloon war in recent weeks, said The Independent, with North Korea floating 200 balloons filled with rubbish and waste last month. That was in response to "activists" from the South, who have been sending balloons "carrying propaganda material about their democratic society and memory devices with K-pop music videos", into the North.

The South has since scrapped a "2018 non-hostility pact aimed at lowering military tensions", the paper added, indicating the "psychological warfare" had "tipped over into real escalation".

The scrapping of that pact has subsequently meant animosity rising across the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), where the South has been playing "propaganda and K-pop music to the North using loudspeakers", said the BBC. In June, its soldiers fired warning shots "by mistake" at North Korean troops who had inadvertently crossed the border, though this prompted "no notable movement from the North". However, the sister of Kim Jong Un, Kim Yo Jong, said previously that the North would launch "new counteractions" if the South did not cease with its actions along the DMZ.

The increasing hostility has already seen the US become further involved, conducting a "precision-guided bombing drill with Seoul" along the peninsula for the first time in seven years as a "warning against North Korea", said The Independent.

Middle East

There is growing worry that an all-out war between Hezbollah in Lebanon and Israel is "looming", said The Economist. The two have "traded drones, rockets and missiles" over months and northern Israel has been "blasted and depopulated".

Hezbollah's mission is to force Israel into enacting a ceasefire in Gaza and its fight against Hamas, but there is "less and less optimism" that a diplomatic solution will be reached before "intense conflict" ensues.

A full-scale war would be a "calamity" for both sides, and there is scepticism that an invasion by Israel would be "presently achievable at acceptable cost". That scenario too would be "devastating for both sides", said The Guardian, and almost certainly draw Iran into direct conflict with Israel.

Iran is Hezbollah's key backer and any conflict between Lebanon and Israel would likely begin a widespread war across the Middle East due to its "complex web of alliances and rivalries", said The Independent. Any direct conflicts between Iran and Israel could then see the US brought directly into the fighting.

However, Iran does not currently believe Hezbollah is "ready for a big war", said The Economist, but there have been warnings against "complacency", with the militia group potentially "better prepared for an Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon than Ukraine was against Russia".

The US and France have been the leaders in negotiations between Hezbollah and Israel to try and defuse tensions and quell the tit-for-tat strikes. The West's diplomats continue to "shuttle between" the sides in the hope of finding a solution to avoid conflict.

China

It has long been assumed that the greatest threat to geopolitical stability is the growing tension between China and the US in recent years, most notably, over Taiwan and the question of its sovereignty.

Beijing sees the island nation as an integral part of a unified Chinese territory. It has, in recent years, adopted an increasingly aggressive stance towards the island and its ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which it has denounced as dangerous separatists, but who won an unprecedented third term earlier this year. At the same time, the US has ramped up its support – financially, militarily and rhetorically – for Taiwan's continued independence.

While most experts agree an imminent escalation is not on the cards, Beijing and Washington have become "desensitised" to the risk these circumstances pose, and in the "militarisation of foreign policy and the failure to grasp the full significance of that militarisation, the pair are one accident and a bad decision removed from a catastrophic war," said Foreign Policy.

There was evidence that the two are a trigger away from escalating conflict last week when tensions ratcheted up after a Taiwanese fishing boat was boarded by the Chinese coast guard near Kinmen islands (a Taiwanese territory) and "steered to mainland China", said The Guardian.

Taiwanese initially sent patrol vessels to rescue the fishing boat but were "blocked" and "told not to interfere" by Chinese boats. Taiwan said it called off the rescue to "avoid escalating the conflict".

Although it is common for Taiwanese boats to fish in the area, around five miles from the mainland, China said this boat had been suspected of "illegal fishing". The Taiwanese coastguard, however, said China was "engaging in political manipulation and harming cross-strait relations" by holding the crew of the ship, but was aiming for a "diplomatic resolution" to avoid any kind of armed escalation, said Israel Hayom.

Any invasion "would be one of the most dangerous and consequential events of the 21st century", said The Times last April. It would "make the Russian attack on Ukraine look like a sideshow by comparison".

Human costs aside, a military conflict between the world's two biggest economies would lead to "a severing of global supply chains, a blow to confidence and crashing asset prices", said The Guardian's economics editor Larry Elliott. "It would have catastrophic economic consequences, up to and including a second Great Depression."