World War III will not start with an exchange of nuclear weapons. It won’t ignite from the jostling of great empires. Nor will it result from a single madman (or two) bent on taking over the world.
It won’t be any of those things because World War III has already begun.
The current global conflagration began not with the joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran. It began with the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. This blatant land grab was not only a massive war crime. Russian President Vladimir Putin also had another target in mind: the rules-based order.
This attack on international law was the Fort Sumter moment for World War III. By invading Ukraine—and then systematically breaking one article of the Geneva Convention after another—Putin effectively seceded from the international community.
There have been other major violations of international law since the end of the Cold War, including the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the U.S. drone attacks in various countries, Israel’s multiple incursions into Lebanon, Rwanda’s invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and so on.
But none of these attacks, however abhorrent, challenged the fundamental structure of the rules-based order like Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Putin didn’t try to enlist the UN on his …read more
Source:: Institute for Policy Studies