Shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I wrote a column under the headline “This Is How World War III Begins.” More than four years on, I wonder how much I got right.

My argument was based on the origins of World War II, which did not simply start with Germany’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. Instead, the war was an accumulation of regional wars and crises, beginning with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, which gradually gathered into a single global conflict.

That gathering, abetted by the converging ambitions of the totalitarian states and the divisions and vacillations of the democracies, led to catastrophe. Added to this was a revolution in military technology and tactics that gave the dictatorships an early advantage in offensive combat. Also an advantage: their willingness to inflict — and endure — a level of brutality and suffering their adversaries were initially reluctant to match.

In 2022, I saw a similar pattern unfolding: Decades of Western appeasement of Vladimir Putin had given the Russian strongman a sense that he could get away with nearly anything. His burgeoning ties with North Korea, Iran and especially China — memorialized by the pledge of a “no limits” partnership with Beijing announced weeks before the invasion — gave him additional confidence. So did the spectacle of American weakness during our shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan just six months earlier.

But Ukraine did not, as I had feared, turn out to be the France of 1940. It was more like Britain, prepared to fight, as Churchill put it that May, “however long and hard the road may be.” The Biden administration, for all its fatal hesitation about letting Kyiv take the war to Russia, at least helped ensure that Ukraine didn’t lose. Ukraine has also held the technological edge, pioneering equipment and tactics that are finally stimulating a long-overdue rethink about how wars of the future will be fought.

That’s the good news. There’s far more by way of bad news.

First, as in the 1930s and ’40s, the spheres of conflict have multiplied and are merging.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/opinion/has-world-war-iii-already-started.html?