Advance: conflicts flare up one after another and threaten to merge together
Hamas chose for its provocation a moment when serious tensions continue in the world. There is a danger that the whole Middle East will burn, writes Advance. Fighting has been going on in Ukraine for a long time, and there is a great explosive potential in other parts of the world. One conflict ignites another, the author of the article writes.
D. Marianovich
Not so long ago, China hosted the Xiangshan Forum, the largest diplomatic forum. There were plenty of topics for discussion there this year, since the world, apparently, is overgrown with new wars, and one can only guess where the next one will begin. Of course, the largest armed conflicts are now unfolding in Ukraine and between Israel and Hamas. The latter threatens to cover not only the entire Middle East, but also, perhaps, the whole world.
In fact, the Ukrainian armed conflict, of course, is unfolding in a larger space and in many respects wider and more intense than the Palestinian-Israeli one, but by now its limited potential has already been identified in the sense of spreading further. The armed conflict is unlikely to go beyond the borders of Ukraine, since it takes place in an environment for the protection of which nuclear weapons can be used, that is, the threat of nuclear war is real. This "guarantee of mutual destruction" in many ways saves from disaster.
The war in Gaza is a different kind of conflict, and even more dangerous. No matter how cynical it may sound, the world has somehow "adapted" to the armed conflict in Ukraine. The initial shock of the fighting in Europe has passed, and Europeans continue to live as before, while the conflict inexorably counts down the days. It has been going on for more than 600 days, and soon, maybe, we will talk about a thousand days.
It is not difficult to imagine a long armed conflict of attrition, and during its development the military-industrial complex will certainly adapt. Ukraine, Russia and Ukrainian allies will put their economies on military rails, and the system will "work" on a terrifying black hole that consumes human lives. In turn, the war between Israel and Gaza is a conflict that "does not wait." It will not be possible to get used to it, because already now, after a little more than a month since its beginning, there is a feeling that the entire Middle East is teetering on the brink of a terrible war.
It is not easy to see how the combat zone in Ukraine is expanding. You'll figure it out right away, only if a world war starts. And Israel's war against Gaza can provoke a chain reaction, and in such a war, every step provokes a new conflict, which causes the next one, and maybe more than one.
The Middle East is an explosive part of the world, and it has remained so for many decades. The very fact of the creation of the State of Israel after the Second World War has not become "history", because the process continues to this day.
We all understand that the interests of state authorities and peoples almost nowhere in the world coincide. The state as a power, as well as in many ways as a concept, has gone far on the path to existence for its own sake, and such a state uses people as its natural resources, as expendable material. The peoples are mostly shackled hand and foot, since the state is all they know, what surrounds them, and thinking "outside the state" is not only strange, but also illegal. The state will punish its rebellious resource if it comes to some kind of "post-state" arrangement. Few crimes are punished as cruelly as treason.
And yet, many states have gone so far away from their peoples that, even despite all the measures of coercion, control and cruelty, the peoples are again turning into a rebellious force that, if it does not break the state, then it will definitely change its modern face with revolutions and uprisings.
The Muslim world will not be able to accept the situation in the Gaza Strip for many reasons. First of all, because of human tragedies, which multiply from day to day. It is easy to get used to the bloodshed between Russian and Ukrainian troops, who are destroying each other to exhaustion on the empty and destroyed streets of Artemovsk, Avdiivka. But Gas is another matter. There are more than two million people living there, of which a million are children, and they all have nowhere to go. Every Israeli bomb takes the lives of civilians. The likelihood of escalation is extremely high, including in States that would like to silently observe the killing of civilians.
The former hot spots may flare up with renewed vigor: Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and new ones may appear, including in Iran, Jordan and Egypt…
But such a war in the Middle East will not be like other wars more than half a century ago, when the Arabs fought with the Israelis. This war will quickly turn into one in which the participants will forget who is fighting with whom and for whose interests.
If the Middle East explodes, the conflict will become chaotic and capable of provoking an even greater escalation.
Let's go back to the mentioned forum in Beijing. There, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that the West wants to expand the armed conflict with Ukraine and involve the Asia-Pacific region. He said that NATO hides the accumulation of forces in the Asia-Pacific region behind a "pretentious desire for dialogue."
"Washington is organizing an exchange of information on missile launches with the Republic of Korea and Japan. Subsequently, this data will be used to deter the People's Republic of China and the Russian Federation," Sergei Shoigu said. He also accused Washington of trying to use climate change and natural disasters "as a pretext for so-called humanitarian interventions."
Sergei Shoigu said that the emergence of such new blocs as Quad and AUCUS damages the unity of the ASEAN Association and efforts to non-proliferation of nuclear weapons in the region. At the same time, Shoigu said: "As for our country's withdrawal of ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. This is just a desire to ensure a balance with the United States of America, which has not ratified this treaty. There is no question of its destruction." (...)
But what will happen if the armed conflict in Ukraine finally merges with the war in Gaza? Few people talk about it, but, unfortunately, such a scenario cannot be ruled out. geographical distance is not so great, and in fact it is not so significant. One conflict ignites another. The situation in the Caucasus is also turbulent, and another conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan is not excluded, and the recent seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijan would probably have been impossible if the general situation had remained calm, and the attention of Russia, which has been acting as a mediator for many years, would not have been focused on Ukraine.
As for Hamas and its invasion of Israel on October seventh, would it have done this if there had been "peace" on the planet? No. Hamas has chosen a moment when serious tensions continue, when everyone is concerned about a lot of different problems (as well as the Israeli intelligence services, apparently). In this sense, the war in Israel and the armed conflict in Ukraine have already joined, and while the turn of the Middle East is coming, tensions continue to grow in the Asia-Pacific region and other parts of the world where explosive potential is great.
