Colonel (Ret.) Robert Hamilton, the co-author, is a former professor at the U.S. Army War College, president of the Delphi Global Research Center and former head of Eurasia Research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marked the beginning of the world’s first truly global strategic conflict since 1945, and the U.S. confrontation with Iran, watched closely by China, now threatens to fuse those overlapping rivalries into the broadest international war of the modern era.
The trigger is that modern high-intensity warfare consumes key weapons far faster than the U.S. and Europe can manufacture replacements. The most acute bottlenecks are sophisticated systems: Patriot interceptors and other air-defense missiles, long-range precision weapons, and some naval air-defense missiles. The Ukraine and Iran theaters literally compete for some of the same finite inventories.
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A Patriot interceptor fired at an Iranian missile cannot defend Kyiv. An American destroyer sent to the Gulf cannot simultaneously deter China in the Pacific. Every commitment creates an opportunity somewhere else. The danger is not that Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang will suddenly declare war together, but that separate conflicts affect each other to such a degree that they come to be seen as one.
In the Ukraine arena, while fighting has remained concentrated locally the conflict has drawn in China, Iran and North Korea, each supporting Moscow according to its own interests. Iran supplied the drones that terrorized Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. North Korea delivered artillery ammunition, ballistic missiles and eventually troops. China sustained Russia’s war economy through dual-use technologies, electronics, financial support and diplomatic protection. Ukraine became the arena in which the world’s leading democratic and authoritarian powers test one another’s strength.
Here’s the situation in its gruesome detail and consequence.
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