By most accounts and developments, tensions in most parts of the world are currently at their peak. Conflicts in Europe, the Middle East and Asia show grave signs of escalating, suggesting the possibility of a Third World War taking place in the not too distant future.

No real guesswork is required to identify the leaders responsible for these simmering and sudden conflagrations. Five or six of them are prominent “players", while the rest are possibly being assisted to manage their own region-wise or country-wise disputes by their more prominent counterparts.

Currently, the prominent ones are Donald Trump (United States), Xi Jinping (China), Vladimir Putin (Russia) and Kim Jong Un (North Korea). The second rung of conflict-driven leaders includes Benjamin Netanyahu (Israel), Ayatollah Khamenei (Iran), Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Ukraine) and Field Marshal Asim Munir (Pakistan).

The bottom line is that the behaviours and endgames of the leaders mentioned are difficult to predict and so is the impact of their decisions on the world community geopolitically, geo-economically and geo-strategically going forward.

Let us start with the crisis in South Asia, involving Pakistan and India, its two major players. The recent crisis emanating out of a terrorist strike in the sublime environs of the Kashmir Valley that claimed 26 civilian lives, has been the most significant one between these two nuclear-armed nations in several decades.

It saw military action unfold and wantonly violate earlier mutually decided and agreed to geographic thresholds. It saw state-of-the-art weaponised systems being used and tested for the first time, with telling impacts produced on the ground. It concluded with intense and high-level diplomatic engagement, with the US government indirectly stroking its keys, though India pointedly denied such third-party intervention.

For the first time, we also saw unprecedented levels of misinformation and disinformation being circulated, both at the diplomatic and the military level, in attempting to project and secure home advantage over what actually transpired between Islamabad and New Delhi during May 7 to 10.

The four-day India-Pakistan conflict following the April 22, 2025 terrorist attack in Pahalgam evolved into a very serious........

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