A senior defense scholar has singled out a potential U.S.-China confrontation over Taiwan as the only realistic scenario that could trigger a third world war in the current international system.
As "Hvylya" reports, Jo Inge Bekkevold, a senior China fellow at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, laid out the argument in an analysis published by Foreign Policy. After ruling out both the war in Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East as candidates for a global conflagration, Bekkevold pointed to the Taiwan Strait as the one scenario that could bring the world's two superpowers into direct military confrontation.
The logic is straightforward. Under Bekkevold's four-criteria framework, a world war requires direct confrontation between major powers, global military operations, total mobilization, and systemic effects on the balance of power. Neither the Russia-Ukraine war nor the Iran conflict involves a direct clash between the United States and China. A war over Taiwan, however, would pit both superpowers against each other by definition.
Yet even a Taiwan conflict might not automatically become a world war. Bekkevold noted there is a possibility such a confrontation "could remain a limited war, depending on how Beijing and Washington manage the risk of escalation." If fighting stayed below the nuclear threshold and remained concentrated in the Western Pacific, the conflict might not meet the global scope criterion.
But therein lies the danger. "The very fact that both China and the United States are contemplating the possibility of a limited war over Taiwan is in itself a risk of a greater conflict given the danger of vertical and horizontal escalation," Bekkevold wrote. European actors could be pulled into a U.S.-China war, and Russia might seize the moment to test Western resolve in Europe - transforming a Pacific conflict into something far broader.
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