The Neue Zürcher Zeitung: The Era of War Has Arrived — the World Divided into Five Major Camps Due to the Ukraine Crisis

On April 24, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung published a bylined column article by its chief editor and senior international commentator Eric Guggenberger titled “Iran, Ukraine, and Taiwan: Why War Is Becoming Increasingly Likely.”

Guggenberger pointed out that two months of armed conflict in the Middle East have already imposed heavy economic costs on the region and beyond, yet most people still fail to grasp: What is the underlying logic behind Trump’s war, which yields no tangible benefits?

Guggenberger argues that Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine has become an irreversible turning point in the international order. At the time, no party had either the will or the capacity to stop this conflict.

Trump’s risky military actions against Iran are a direct outcome of the Putin effect. In February 2022, the old global order based on international law collapsed completely. Today’s international competition has entirely devolved into a doctrine where power determines right.

Guggenberger claims that the reason the United States dares to launch wars recklessly lies in the absence of any external force capable of checking it. Russia and China cannot do so; the weak and fragmented Europe is even less able. No one can stop America’s military strikes. This obvious fact is triggering far-reaching and dangerous chain reactions.

He believes that today’s Middle Eastern turmoil is not an isolated incident but rather a microcosm of global structural transformation: the world is moving away from the unipolar order established after the Soviet collapse, transitioning toward a multipolar landscape marked by competing power blocs. In this new structure, five core powers have emerged: the United States, China, Russia, India, and the European Union — traditional principles of international coexistence have now completely failed.

Guggenberger particularly emphasizes that all of this is an extension of the Putin effect. In 2022, there was no sufficiently powerful and resolute force within the international community capable of halting Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine.

Guggenberger forecasts that the emerging five-power balance of power will plunge the world into extremely high security risks. In the coming years, local hot conflicts like those in Ukraine and in the Persian Gulf will become routine rather than exceptions.

At the same time, he denies that such divisions will escalate into a global-scale full-scale war akin to World War I or II, asserting that conflicts will remain confined to regional levels — although their negative impacts will radiate globally.

Micro-commentary

First, Guggenberger’s assertion of the collapse of the unipolar world, the emergence of five poles, and the normalization of localized conflicts aligns with current realities in international politics.

The United States, China, Russia, India, and the EU are indeed the five indispensable core actors in today’s global geopolitical, economic, and military landscape. The weakening of the old international legal framework and the rise of military brinkmanship are objective facts. Moreover, Guggenberger’s prediction that frequent localized hot conflicts will become normalized fits recent global chaos: ongoing tensions in Ukraine, the Middle East, the Red Sea, and Asia-Pacific regions; great powers engaging in proxy wars and limited local confrontations to avoid direct large-scale warfare — a strategy consistent with the strategic bottom lines of major power competition.

Second, Guggenberger’s argument contains a fatal logical flaw: he reverses causality, artificially grafting American-style hegemony onto the secondary consequences of the Ukraine conflict.

The core cause of the collapse of the old order lies in America’s long-standing unilateralism and its repeated violations of international law (such as the Iraq and Syria wars), not in the Ukraine crisis itself. Guggenberger confuses the timeline and responsibility for the breakdown of global order. Furthermore, he consistently adopts Western mainstream narratives, unilaterally defining the Ukraine conflict as “Russia’s invasion,” attributing all instability in Eastern Europe solely to Putin, while deliberately overlooking the root causes of the conflict — NATO expansion and geopolitical security encroachment. By blaming “Putin’s disruption of order” for America’s military adventurism in Iran, Guggenberger obscures the essence of U.S. hegemonic expansion and ignores America’s long history of meddling in the Middle East and launching unilateral military actions. He forcibly redefines American hegemonic behavior as a secondary consequence of the Ukraine conflict.

Third, Guggenberger’s conclusion is contradictory.

While acknowledging that localized conflicts are prone to escalation, he remains firmly convinced that a world war will not break out — thereby ignoring the immense risks of miscalculation and spillover effects in proxy wars under the five-power balance. A historical fact deliberately ignored by Guggenberger is this: both World War I and World War II began as small-scale border skirmishes before rapidly engulfing the entire world and evolving into global catastrophes.

Original source: toutiao.com/article/1863445431233548/

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone.