My latest piece over at Dale & Co looks at a possible spiral down into the next global conflagration:

In short, the planet’s legal and moral order looks and feels weak. For the first time in centuries the USA and Europe are increasingly unable to define, let alone set the global agenda. Other powers are slowly coming to the fore. They sense that things are going their way: why not exploit this situation to redraw the map – and rewrite the global rules – as they see fit?

What in fact is stopping a new brazen ‘grab what you can’ looting attitude emerging? And if it does emerge, what is to stop it? Conventional weapons and tactics are useless against more or less spontaneous bottom-up networked challenges to existing ruling elites.

World Wars One and Two were conflicts with global consequences arising from European power-struggles. But there was at least a clear context, involving classic thematic rivalries in an understandable form. And far fewer countries were global players. World War Three will be different, a crazy free-for-all.

Disintegration in this sense is not pre-ordained. Western uncertainty is matched by Chinese, Russian and Indian hesitation. Yes, those powers see an historic opportunity to move into the philosophical and political space created by the West’s disarray. Yet how best to do it successfully, without doing immense economic damage to themselves or falling prey to destabilizing ‘flash riots’ which seem to come from nowhere in more and more countries?

At least they have options. Including ‘wait and see’. After all, even if they do nothing their relative power improves as Western confidence and reach diminish. Why bother to loot, when sooner or later plenty of juicy apples may well start to fall into your lap?

Maybe one extra point should be made. Any such free-for-all might not necessarily involve massed armies and messy explosions, although in practice no doubt there would be plenty of them. Deft cyberwarfare aimed at sneakily weakening key enemy military and civilian infrastucture installations time after time might be enough…