Modern Age A Conservative Review Essays - Are We Heading Toward World War III? - Regional conflicts have expanded into global ones before.- Francis P. Sempa - April 29, 2026

 Modern Age

A Conservative Review

Essays

Are We Heading Toward World War III?

Regional conflicts have expanded into global ones before.

Francis P. Sempa

April 29, 2026

he Second World War was the most destructive conflict in human history. When it was over, some sixty million people were dead. It featured the mass bombing of cities and civilians, the torture and murder of prisoners of war, starvation, genocide, and the use of atomic weapons. The peace that ended the war was imperfect. Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, which helped start the European phase of the war, was one of the victors, and its totalitarian realm expanded. China’s civil war continued, resulting in Mao Zedong’s communist conquest of the mainland. World War II gave birth to the nuclear age and the Cold War, with all of its “smaller” wars and crises. Winston Churchill, who led Great Britain to victory in the war, wrote afterward that “there never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle.” He called World War II the “unnecessary war.”  

Historians and commentators have debated the war’s lessons for eighty years. Churchill in The Gathering Storm blamed what he called the “follies of the victors” of the First World War. “Both in Europe and in Asia,” he explained, “conditions were swiftly created by the victorious Allies which, in the name of peace, cleared the way for the renewal of war.” He noted how “the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous,” how “the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger,” and how “the middle course adopted from desires of safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull’s-eye of disaster.” Churchill’s book laid out perhaps the most popular and influential lesson of the Second World War: that appeasement only leads to greater aggression and ultimately war. It is a lesson that has been used and misused ever after—in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and now in Ukraine and Iran.

But there is a more important lesson of World War II—one that today’s world leaders should be mindful of—and it was best explained by Victor Davis Hanson in his masterly history of the war, The Second World Wars. Hanson’s title highlights the key insight of his analysis. World War II did not begin as a global conflict. Instead, it grew and expanded as a result of a series of regional wars that began in Asia in 1937 with Japan’s invasion of China, and began in Europe in 1939 with Germany’s and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Poland. “World War II,” Hanson writes,began traditionally enough in 1939-1940 in Europe as a series of border conflicts exclusively between European powers, including Britain. . . . By the end of 1940, what had so far seemed to be familiar European infighting had achieved a Caesarian or Napoleonic scale. But by the end of 1941, something quite cataclysmic followed: all the smaller conflicts compounded unexpectedly into a total, global war, in which the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan were soon materially outmatched, strategically unprepared, and likely to lose in catastrophic fashion.

The events that transformed regional wars into the Second World War, according to Hanson, were Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Japan’s attack on Pacific territories of the United States and Britain, and Germany’s and Italy’s declarations of war against the United States. “Only these unforeseen developments in the single year of 1941,” he writes, “recalibrated prior regional conflicts in Europe and Asia into a continuous and now interconnected global war that drew three new powerful participants—Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States—into two formidable alliances.”

Today there are two regional wars—in Ukraine and the Middle East—and rising tensions in the western Pacific that could potentially expand into a catastrophic global conflict like World War II. The war in Ukraine has been going on for four years, and there is no end in sight. NATO’s involvement on the side of Ukraine coupled with China and North Korea’s assistance to Russia means that the longer that war continues the greater is the possibility that it expands.

The U.S.–Israeli war against Iran has already expanded to Lebanon, other Gulf states, and, most importantly, the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil, including much of Europe’s and most of China’s imported oil, transits. The U.S. blockade of the strait means that a naval clash between the United States and China is a possibility, which could also further heighten tensions in the western Pacific. A war in the western Pacific over Taiwan could draw in Japan, the Philippines, and Russia.

It was, in Hanson’s words, the unforeseen and unexpected developments arising out of regional wars that transformed those wars into the cataclysmic Second World War. That could happen in Ukraine and the Middle East if diplomacy fails to end those current conflicts. The United States, China, Russia, Israel, and North Korea have nuclear weapons. A global war that involves some or all of those powers could therefore be even more destructive than World War II. Let us hope that Hanson or an equally insightful historian doesn’t one day have to write a book titled The Third World Wars.