Many Western statesmen initially assumed the Spanish Civil War would remain a localized conflict, hermetically sealed within the Iberian Peninsula. Instead it drew in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and fascist Italy as active belligerents, accelerated the consolidation of the Axis alliance, galvanized ideological mobilization across the globe, and reshaped European politics in ways that fed directly into World War II. A new HCSS report argues that the war in Ukraine follows a remarkably similar pattern of global escalation.

Iskander Rehman, the report's author, writes that those who frame the war in Ukraine as a discrete European conflict that can "be settled cheaply so that strategic attention can pivot elsewhere risk a comparable failure of imagination," "Hvylya" reports, citing the study from the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies.

The war has already redrawn the contours of the international order. North Korean troops, Chinese material support, Iranian drones, and African mercenaries have been drawn in alongside Russia. On the opposing side, Asian democracies such as Japan, Australia, and South Korea have drawn closer to NATO and provided valuable support to Kyiv. The conflict's outcome, Rehman argues, will set the terms for whether revisionist powers globally conclude that the post-1945 prohibition on territorial conquest by force is a living norm or a dead letter.

The Spanish precedent is instructive. Germany's shared anti-communist crusade in Spain provided the ideological cement that drew Japan closer to the Axis powers through the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936. The conflict that Western statesmen initially dismissed as a regional brush fire instead morphed into the furnace in which the international order of the 1930s was irrevocably destroyed.

Frontline Indo-Pacific countries from Taiwan to Japan and the Philippines have already drawn lessons from Ukraine's maritime innovations. Taiwan has intensified its procurement of unmanned maritime systems and sea drones after observing Ukraine's successful sea denial campaign in the Black Sea. The report argues that thinking across regional seams "is not to indulge in strategic overextension but to recognize the conflict for what it actually is: a stress test of the entire rules-based international order."

"Hvylya" earlier reported on how the Iran war pulled U.S. military assets from around the globe while China watched closely.