Two years ago I mulled over the different ways in which World War Three might start:

Maybe it all gets just too complicated. Too many things go wrong at the same time.

The capacity of the world’s leaders and institutions to respond in a coherent and authoritative way on several huge problems at the same time ebbs away. This opens the way for calculated lunges by different regional powers, aiming quickly to establish some new facts on the ground while attentions are distracted elsewhere…

… Western policy-makers in particular are paralysed, bogged down in their economic problems and unwilling to use military force since it is no longer clear (a) that Western military force can achieve victory in the sort of conflicts now breaking out in different places, and (b) what a stable outcome in any one place might look like.

Western hesitation is matched by Chinese, Russian and Indian hesitation. Those powers themselves are struggling as world markets seize up, but they see an historic opportunity for themselves to move into the philosophical space created by Western retreat.

World Wars One and Two were conflicts with global reach arising from European power-struggles. But there was at least a clear context, involving thematic rivalries in an understandable form.

World War Three is different. For the first time in centuries the USA and Europe are unable to set or even define the global agenda, and so face philosophical and psychological defeat. Other powers come to the fore, fighting and redrawing the map – and therefore the rules – as they see fit.

The turmoil is all the more dramatic and vicious for being in a sense anarchic and incoherent, even if civilisational principles are implicitly at stake.

One of the possible triggers I identified was a Eurozone crisis:

… the Eurozone crisis quickly enters a new phase, with civil unrest breaking out in Greece and financial markets seizing up in other European capitals. Cash machines across much of Europe run dry; just-in-time supplies of food to Europe’s supermarkets falter  

Hmm. Greece returns to the polls today, but why does anyone think that a stable majority dutifully accepting and delivering a sensible economic plan (whataver that might be these days) will emerge?

I don’t. Seems far more likely that any new government will be unable to do anything sensible for very long, as the practical willingness of people in Greece to trust their national institutions and the banks (let alone EU ones) is in abrupt decline.

There doesn’t need to be a formal war, ie one side lined up against another as in WW2. That’s so 70 years ago.

Rather a sauve qui peut scramble for resources breaks out in some places and others pile in with economic measures and/or cyber warfare to try to take advantage of the chaos: positive feedback thereby takes place – one crisis prompts another uncontrollably.

Unrealistic? How would we tell?