Analysis: US strikes on Iran’s Qeshm Island on the eve of the American midterms, a drone sinking a ship off Romania and fresh North Korean missile launches have revived an old question: how close is the world to a wider war? This analysis weighs the World War 3 risk through what defence chiefs, spy bosses and think tanks have said over the past year. It is not a forecast that war is coming.
Iran: the war already being fought
The US-Iran conflict, which Euronews reports began in late February, flared again on Monday when a US official described strikes on Iranian targets in the Strait of Hormuz as defensive, aimed at forces firing surface-to-air missiles at American assets. Iranian media reported five explosions on Qeshm Island. The strait normally carries around a fifth of the world’s oil.
Yet diplomacy has not stopped. Qatar and Pakistan are helping with indirect talks, and in a Financial Times interview on Tuesday Donald Trump said he had no immediate plans to attack, adding: “We seem to be getting everything we want.” The New York Times, however, reported that US forces could resume strikes as early as Wednesday, and Iran’s Mohsen Rezaei says Washington must meet seven conditions before the strait reopens.
Russia and NATO’s eastern flank
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte gave one of the starkest warnings last December in Berlin, telling allies: “We are Russia’s next target.” He suggested Moscow could be ready to use force against the alliance within five years. Days later Blaise Metreweli, in her first speech as head of Britain’s MI6, said the UK was living between peace and war, pointing to sabotage, cyber attacks and drones over airports.
The Black Sea shows how quickly incidents pile up. On October 23 the cargo ship Khoryv sank about 13 nautical miles off Constanta, just outside Romanian waters, after a drone strike that left one sailor dead and three missing. Romania blamed Russia, which had not commented, and NATO has said it will send more patrol aircraft, radar and drones to the region. Ukraine peace efforts remain stuck: US envoys met Vladimir Putin in September without an apparent breakthrough.
Taiwan and North Korea
China’s Justice Mission 2025 war games around Taiwan, launched on December 29, were the sixth major round since 2022, and Beijing said for the first time that such drills were meant to deter outside intervention. In October China held coastal live-fire drills across five zones from the South China Sea to Liaoning, though none were around Taiwan itself, according to Reuters. The Council on Foreign Relations’ annual Preventive Priorities Survey, published in December, rated a cross-strait crisis as at least 50 per cent likely in 2026 and high-impact for US interests.
North Korea fired several ballistic missiles on October 12, one travelling more than 900km. Kim Jong Un has rebuffed Trump’s calls to resume talks.
Is the World War 3 risk really rising? The case against panic
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight in January, the closest ever, citing the looming end of the New START arms treaty. That treaty lapsed in February, but Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow would keep to its limits as long as Washington does.
Florence Gaub, head of research at the NATO Defense College, has argued that the bigger danger is not someone deliberately choosing a world war but an accident or misreading that spirals. Against that, brakes remain: nuclear deterrence, open channels to Tehran, continuing US mediation over Ukraine, and the fact that no flashpoint has yet pulled the major powers into direct combat.
None of the officials cited here has said a third world war is inevitable. Read together, their warnings about the World War 3 risk are a call to prepare and to deter, rather than a prediction that war will break out.
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Sources: Euronews, The New Arab, The Star (Reuters), The Irish News, Al Jazeera, bdnews24, Dawn, ThePrint (Reuters), Council on Foreign Relations, New York Post via DNYUZ, CBS News, Al Jazeera, JOE
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