What major security threats do we face?

On the face of it, last week’s NATO summit in Washington ticked all the boxes. The alliance got to show that it is bigger and stronger than ever, its military support for Ukraine appears undiminished, and it just sent China a clear message to stop secretly supporting Russia’s war against Kyiv.

At a time when political uncertainty hangs over the White House and much of Europe, Sir Keir Starmer’s new government has the chance to position itself as the linchpin of the transatlantic alliance.

At home in the UK, the new government has pressing priorities: the economy, housing, immigration, the National Health Service (NHS), to name just a few.

However, it often happens that unwanted threats and scenarios emerge and thwart even the best-laid plans.

So what might await us during the term of this new British government?

This is no surprise, everyone has this scenario in mind. But that does not make it any less dangerous – for Lebanon, Israel and the entire Middle East.

“The possibility of a large-scale Israeli invasion of Lebanon this summer should be at the top of the new administration’s geopolitical risk list.”

This is the view of Professor Malcolm Chalmers, deputy director of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank in Whitehall.

Given the ongoing conflict in Gaza and ongoing Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, Professor Chalmers believes that “we could be entering a period of sustained war on multiple fronts in the region for which neither Israel nor its Western partners are prepared.”

Since the Hamas-led raid on southern Israel on October 7 last year, there have been fears that Israel’s subsequent military operation in the Gaza Strip could escalate across borders into a full-scale regional war.

The greatest danger of such a war lies on Israel’s troubled northern border with Lebanon.

The daily exchange of fire between the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Iran-backed Shiite militia Hezbollah across this border has already claimed hundreds of lives, most of them in Lebanon.

More than 60,000 Israelis in the north have been forced to flee their homes and livelihoods, and on the Lebanese side the number is even higher.

Domestic pressure is growing on the Israeli government to “deal with” Hezbollah by moving its troops north of Lebanon’s Litani River, from where they would have less chance of firing rockets at Israel.

“We don’t want war,” says Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani of the Israeli army, “but I don’t think any country could accept the expulsion of 60,000 of its citizens. This situation must end. We would like to see a diplomatic solution, but the patience of the Israelis is slowly running out.”

There are good reasons for both sides not to start a war.

Lebanon’s economy is already fragile, having barely recovered from the 2006 war with Israel, and a renewed full-scale conflict would have a devastating impact on the country’s infrastructure and its population.

Hezbollah, in turn, would likely respond to a major Israeli attack and invasion with a massive and sustained barrage of rockets, drones and missiles that could potentially overwhelm Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system.

No place in Israel is beyond his reach.

At this point, the US Navy, stationed off the coast, could well step in on Israel’s side. This then raises the question of what Iran would do.

Israel also has a significant arsenal of ballistic missiles and a network of proxy militias in Iraq, Yemen and Syria that could be mobilized to intensify its attacks on Israel.

One way to ease tensions on the Israeli-Lebanese border would be to end the conflict in Gaza. But after nine months and a horrifying death toll, lasting peace has still not been achieved.

The nuclear deal with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), designed to contain and monitor Iran’s nuclear program, was the crowning foreign policy achievement of the Obama administration in 2015.

But it has long since fallen apart.

A year after President Trump unilaterally withdrew from the alliance, Iran no longer complied with the rules.

Hidden deep beneath vast mountains, seemingly beyond the reach of even the most powerful bunker-buster bombs, Iran’s nuclear centrifuges are working at full speed, enriching uranium well beyond the 20 percent needed for peaceful civilian uses. (A nuclear bomb requires highly enriched uranium.)

Officially, Iran insists that its nuclear program is purely peaceful and serves only to generate energy.

But Israeli and Western experts have expressed fears that Iran is pursuing a secret program to achieve what is known as “breakout capability”: that is, it wants to reach a position in which it has the ability to build a nuclear bomb but does not necessarily use it.

Iran is unlikely to have failed to notice that North Korea, as an isolated global pariah, is continuously amassing an arsenal of nuclear warheads and their delivery systems, which has a significant deterrent effect on any potential attacker.

If Iran gets the bomb, it is almost inevitable that Saudi Arabia, its regional rival, will also seek it. The same goes for Turkey and Egypt.

And suddenly there is a nuclear arms race throughout the Middle East.

This depends on what you define as “winning”.

In an extreme case, this means Russian forces overwhelming Ukraine’s defenses and taking over the rest of the country, including the capital Kyiv, and replacing the pro-Western government of President Volodymyr Zelensky with a puppet regime appointed by Moscow.

This, of course, was the original plan behind the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022, a plan that failed spectacularly.

This scenario is currently considered unlikely.

But Russia does not need to conquer all of Ukraine to have a “victory” that it can present to its people to justify the astronomical losses it is suffering in this war.

Russia already occupies around 18 percent of Ukraine and its forces are slowly gaining ground in the east.

Although more Western weapons are on the way, Ukraine is critically short of manpower. The bravely fighting troops, often vastly outnumbered and outgunned, are exhausted.

The Russian commanders, who seem to care nothing about the lives of their men, have the masses on their side. The entire Russian economy is on a war footing, and almost 40 percent of the state budget is now spent on defense.

President Vladimir Putin, whose recent “conditions for peace talks” amounted to a complete surrender of Ukraine, believes time is on his side. He knows there is a good chance that his old friend Donald Trump will be back in the White House within months and that Western support for Ukraine will begin to crumble.

All Russia needs to do is hold on to the territories it has already conquered and deny Ukraine a chance to join NATO and the EU, and it could declare a partial victory in what it portrays as a fight for Russian survival.

Here, too, there are numerous warnings that this could happen.

China’s President Xi Jinping and his officials have stated on numerous occasions that Taiwan’s self-governing island democracy must be “returned to the motherland”, if necessary by force.

Taiwan does not want to be ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Beijing.

But China views Taiwan as a breakaway province and wants to see it “reunified” long before the centenary of the CCP’s founding in 2049.

The United States has adopted a stance toward Taiwan that it calls “strategic ambiguity.”

The country is legally obliged to help defend Taiwan, but Washington prefers to keep China unclear about whether this also means sending US troops to fend off a Chinese invasion.

China would almost certainly prefer not to invade Taiwan.

This would be extremely costly in both blood and money. Ideally, Beijing would like to get Taiwan to give up its dreams of complete independence and voluntarily submit to the mainland.

However, since this seems unlikely at present – ​​Taiwanese have watched with horror the decline of democracy in Hong Kong – Beijing has another option up its sleeve.

If and when action is taken against Taiwan, it will probably be attempted to seal the country off from the outside world and make life unbearable for Taiwanese citizens. However, it will be done with as little bloodshed as possible so as not to provoke a war with the United States.

Is Taiwan important? Yes, it is.

This is about more than just the noble principles of defending a democratic ally on the other side of the world.

Taiwan produces more than 90% of the world’s highest-quality microchips – the tiny pieces of technology that power nearly everything that makes modern life possible.

A war between the US and China over Taiwan would have catastrophic consequences for the global economy that would overshadow the war in Ukraine.

Not exactly, but there are some moderating factors here.

For China, trade is of paramount importance. Beijing’s ambitious plans to push the U.S. Navy out of the Western Pacific and dominate the entire region could be dampened by its reluctance to trigger damaging sanctions and a global trade war.

In Ukraine, President Putin may be able to make slow and gradual territorial gains, but this comes at a terrible cost in terms of casualties.

When the Red Army occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s, it lost around 15,000 people within a decade, sparking protests at home and accelerating the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In Ukraine, Russia has suffered many times that number of deaths in just a quarter of that time. Protests have been limited so far – the Kremlin largely controls what news Russians see – but the longer this war goes on, the greater the risk that the Russian public will eventually recoil at the rising number of citizens killed.

There is great concern in Europe that a future Trump presidency could deprive the EU of its historic protection, and a new security pact is being prepared under British leadership.

As the US presidential election in November approaches, plans to contain any potential negative impact on the continent’s security are intensifying.