At the risk of sounding a little foolish, there is, sadly, much evidence that World War Three has already arrived, though not quite in the way so many futurologists of the past imagined it, as a clash between superpowers, their tanks chasing each other across the North German plain.

Nowadays, our planet is much more kaleidoscopic and asymmetric in its violence than that, and the world is pretty much in flames already, should we care to look. The question is whether all the present (relatively) little wars could actually mutate into, or trigger, a real superpower conflict involving the US, Russia and China, at the least.

We are probably not yet at the most dangerous pass since 1945: the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and the early 1980s felt more frightening in those terms, in truth much more than after 9/11, traumatising as that event was. But we are certainly in risky, unstable, uncertain times.

There are about 195 countries in the world. Only a dozen or so can be said to be properly at peace: Iceland, the world’s most peaceful country according to the Global Peace Index, followed by Denmark, Austria, New Zealand, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Canada, Japan, Slovenia and Finland. A tiny proportion of the world’s population reside in these outposts of calm. The list of conflicts, wars, civil wars, insurgencies and permanent states of terror is a much longer one, from the all-too-familiar agonies of Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, Boko Haram in west Africa, and Yemen through to less well-covered conflicts such as the drugs wars in Mexico and insurgencies from Burma to Armenia and Azerbaijan to (until recently) Colombia. Britain, one way or another, has been in some sort of conflict every year since 1914, with the sole exception of 1968.

In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Show all 19 1 /19 In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Syrian boys cry following Russian air strikes on the rebel-held Fardous neighbourhood of the northern embattled Syrian city of Aleppo Getty In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Russian defense ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov speaks to the media in Moscow, Russia. Konashenkov strongly warned the United States against striking Syrian government forces and issued a thinly-veiled threat to use Russian air defense assets to protect them AP In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Syrians wait to receive treatment at a hospital following Russian air strikes on the rebel-held Fardous neighbourhood of the northern embattled Syrian city of Alepp Getty In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov speaks at a briefing in the Defense Ministry in Moscow, Russia. Antonov said the Russian air strikes in Syria have killed about 35,000 militants, including about 2,700 residents of Russia AP In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Jameel Mustafa Habboush, receives oxygen from civil defence volunteers, known as the white helmets, as they rescue him from under the rubble of a building following Russian air strikes on the rebel-held Fardous neighbourhood of the northern embattled Syrian city of Aleppo Getty In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Civil defence members rest amidst rubble in a site hit by what activists said were airstrikes carried out by the Russian air force in the town of Douma, eastern Ghouta in Damascus, Syria Reuters In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria A girl carrying a baby inspects damage in a site hit by what activists said were airstrikes carried out by the Russian air force in the town of Douma, eastern Ghouta in Damascus, Syria Reuters In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Civilians and civil defence members look for survivors at a site damaged after Russian air strikes on the Syrian rebel-held city of Idlib, Syria Reuters In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Civilians and civil defence members carry an injured woman on a stretcher at a site damaged after Russian air strikes on the Syrian rebel-held city of Idlib, Syria Reuters In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Volunteers from Syria Civil Defence, also known as the White Helmets, help civilians after Russia carried out its first airstrikes in Syria In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria The aftermath of Russian airstrike in Talbiseh, Syria In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Smoke billows from buildings in Talbiseh, in Homs province, western Syria, after airstrikes by Russian warplanes AP In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Russian Air Forces carry out an air strike in the ISIS controlled Al-Raqqah Governorate. Russia's KAB-500s bombs completely destroy the Liwa al-Haqq command unit In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Caspian Flotilla of the Russian Navy firing Kalibr cruise missiles against remote Isis targets in Syria Â© TASS/ITAR-TASS Photo/Corbis In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Russia claimed it hit eight Isis targets, including a "terrorist HQ and co-ordination centre" that was completely destroyed In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria A video grab taken from the footage made available on the Russian Defence Ministry's official website, purporting to show an airstrike in Syria In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria A release from the Russian defence ministry purportedly showing targets in Syria being hit In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Russia launched air strikes in war-torn Syria, its first military engagement outside the former Soviet Union since the occupation of Afghanistan in 1979. Russian warplanes carried out strikes in three Syrian provinces along with regime aircraft as Putin seeks to steal US President Barack Obama's thunder by pushing a rival plan to defeat Isis militants in Syria In pictures: Russian air strikes in Syria Caspian Flotilla of the Russian Navy firing Kalibr cruise missiles against remote Isis targets in Syria, a thousand kilometres away. The targets include ammunition factories, ammunition and fuel depots, command centres, and training camps Â© TASS/ITAR-TASS Photo/Corbis

So the world is at war, and more so than at any point than in most people’s lifetimes. It is a way of life for most of humanity. Each conflict is different, of course. Slogans such as the “war on terror” or the “war on militant Islamism” fail to capture this reality. After all, many of these conflicts – as we see graphically in Syria and Yemen, for example – are between different groups of militant Islamists, with the Sunni-Shia divide more or less visible. Closer to home, in Northern Ireland, some of the bloodiest moments in the Troubles came when armed Republicans fought armed Loyalists, rather than the security forces. The tendency with al-Qaeda and Isis is for semi-autonomous or autonomous groups, or just random disaffected individuals armed with only a light truck or a smuggled gun, to “affiliate” themselves, often after the event.

The “clash of civilisations”, the famous phrase coined by Samuel Huntington a quarter century ago, has not materialised in the sense he envisaged – substantial blocs of nation states fighting conventional wars across “faultiness”. Instead, we have these fragmented, chaotic, unpredictable sets of “players” that vary in size and potency from the United States of America to a lone maniac with a machete on a train in Germany, or gangs of drunken child soldiers in the Central African Republic. There are proxy wars which defy easy categorisation into a pattern of “the West versus the Rest”. Where America wants to retain friendlier relations with Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose side is the US on in the proxy war between Tehran and Riyadh in Yemen? When the Hutu and the Tutsi attempt genocide, they do so for ethnic not geopolitical reasons.

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Even so, the immediate danger now is Cold War 2, much more than a “hot” Third World War, though one could grow out of the other. The US-Russia relationship is on a pivot between progress and failure, more so than at any time since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Also unsteady are America’s and Russia’s respective relations with China, which, as has been true since the Sino-Soviet split in 1961 and Richard Nixon’s historic visit in 1972, can be categorised, in Huntington’s terms, as a “swing superpower”, and a better armed, active and richer one nowadays.

When America and Russia cannot act together in the face of a common threat on the scale of Isis, then there is certainly little cause for optimism. Putin won his war in the Ukraine with the annexation of Crimea and the de facto capture of eastern Ukraine, on the very borders of Nato and the European Union. Perhaps, had Donald Trump not been so enchanted by Vladimir Putin, we would have heard more about that particular failing by the Obama administration in the presidential campaign.

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On that score, cosying up to Russia, President Trump might be better for world peace than the second President Clinton; but at what price? Trump has also made little secret of his essential isolationism, dismissing Nato and, implicitly, offering up the Baltic republics to Putin as a few morsels, as if they were not worth the bones of an American marine. Thus would Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania leave the European Union against their will and join a reborn Russian sphere of influence.

Others – the central Asian republics for example, and Georgia (where Russia has already fought a war of aggression) – might not be far behind. A Cold War would see aggressive, steady Russian expansionism accelerate, in a way we haven’t seen since the 1970s, or Hitler’s opportunistic land grabs. In that way we could be living through something similar to the “steps to war” every school child learns that the world trod in the 1930s; appeasement feeding the appetite of the beast.

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Or it could arrive more rapidly, this transition from Cold War to hot war – more like the way it did in 1914, almost out of a clear blue sky. There are plenty of corners of the world that replicate some or all of the features of the Balkans in the late summer of 1914: the Baltic republics, Korea, the South China sea, Ukraine and the Middle East are the more obvious ones.

But a hot war would not mean Americans directly in hand-to-hand combat with Russians, either conventionally or through nuclear weaponry. The doctrine of mutually assured destruction still applies. More probable, as in the last Cold War, is that they will try to stay out and allow their proxies to fight the wars for them.

Every conflict during the Cold War was fought by armies or insurgents working on behalf of the Americans, Russians, or, occasionally the Chinese. Sometimes the superpowers committed their own troops – usually the US, as in Korea (under UN auspices) and in Vietnam, though the Russians went in in force to Afghanistan in the 1979 invasion, their own “Vietnam”. But Russians and Americans rarely, if ever, faced each other. The mujahedeen that resisted the Russians occupiers and their puppet regime in Afghanistan? Armed and advised by the CIA via Pakistan, including one Osama bin Laden. Wars in Korea, Vietnam, Angola (where the Russians sent Cubans and the Americans backed South Africa), and between Israelis and Arabs were or all, more or less, proxy affairs, where locals or the allies of the superpowers lost many more civilian and military lives than did the Americans or Russians.