Last month, an Iranian cargo ship in the Caspian Sea was struck by a Ukrainian drone. Kyiv claimed the vessel was carrying military equipment heading toward Russia. “The regime in Tehran is a direct accomplice to Russian aggression against Ukraine, fueling Moscow’s criminal war with weapons,” Kyiv’s foreign minister said. Tehran reportedly contemplated a counterstrike on one of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, then thought better of it. But the threat of a conflagration is higher now than at any point since the end of the Cold War.

Conflicts that are currently contained risk spilling out and engulfing whole regions, perhaps the world. If the Iran and Ukraine conflicts were to merge, we’d see a war that runs from Poland to the edges of India. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky says that World War Three has already begun.

Iran and Ukraine are far from the only potential theaters of escalation: there is the possibility of a war in Yemen between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis, Iran’s proxy force, and a growing anger in the Muslim world about Israel’s seizure of parts of Lebanon. Not to mention the India-Pakistan border, the South China Sea, the Korean Peninsula and the Strait of Taiwan.

Rarely has the US moved so quickly toward a major foreign-policy debacle — despite repeated warnings

Rarely has the US moved so quickly toward a major foreign-policy debacle — despite repeated warnings

The danger lies in the possibility that conflicts in different regions begin to reinforce one another, overwhelming the capacity of even the most experienced statesmen to contain them. Barbara Tuchman’s 1962 book The Guns of August is a masterful study of how World War One began – the accumulation of “terrible ifs,” as Churchill called them. One of the main causes of that conflict was a misunderstanding of adversaries. Germany was convinced Britain would stay out of the war and that even if London were to involve itself, the conflict would be so brief that it wouldn’t matter. The great lesson from Tuchman is that those hurtling toward war can’t see what’s coming.

Vladimir Putin believed Ukraine would fall within hours of a direct assault on its capital. On the outskirts of Kyiv, abandoned Russian military vehicles were found to contain parade uniforms, ready for the victory celebrations on Maidan Nezalezhnosti. And Zelensky clearly misjudged his American allies when he, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance had a shouting match in the Oval Office last year. The Ukrainian President tried to push back at the idea of a lasting negotiated settlement. “You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people,” Trump told Zelensky. “You’re gambling with World War Three.”

This year, Trump took the same gamble. He too spectacularly misjudged his adversaries. The President seemed to believe that he could topple the Iranian regime in a matter of weeks. Iranians would pour........

© The Spectator