Six conflicts to watch in 2026: the flashpoints shaping global security

01 The Russia-Ukraine war: attrition, stalemate, and the endurance question

The Russia-Ukraine war, now in its fourth year, has settled into a grinding war of attrition that defies clean characterization as either stalemate or escalation. Ukrainian forces, bolstered by continued Western military aid — including F-16 fighters, ATACMS long-range missiles, and expanding domestic drone production — have held the line along a roughly 1,000-kilometer front while conducting deep strikes into Russian territory against oil refineries, ammunition depots, and logistics hubs. Russian forces, having absorbed catastrophic personnel losses estimated at over 500,000 casualties by mid-2026, continue to advance in incremental, meter-by-meter gains in the Donbas at enormous human cost. The Russian defense industrial base, on a war footing since 2023, now produces approximately 3 million artillery shells per year, aided by components and technology transfers from North Korea and Iran.

The strategic question in 2026 is endurance: which side breaks first. Ukraine's challenge is manpower — mobilization laws passed in 2024 lowered the draft age, but recruitment lag has forced frontline rotations to extend. Russia's challenge is economic: despite oil revenue circumventing Western price caps through shadow fleets and intermediaries, the Central Bank of Russia has raised interest rates above 20 percent to contain inflation, and the ruble's instability threatens the domestic political equilibrium. Western unity, tested by political transitions in the United States and ongoing debates in the European Union, remains the decisive variable. A negotiated settlement — frozen conflict, demilitarized zone, or political settlement — remains the most probable outcome, but the terms depend on battlefield dynamics that neither side can fully control.

02 Middle East: Israel, Iran, and the Gaza aftermath

The Middle East in 2026 is defined by the aftermath of the October 2023 Hamas attack and the cascading conflicts it triggered. The Gaza war, which killed over 47,000 Palestinians and approximately 1,200 Israelis according to verified mortality data, has entered a post-conflict phase that is neither peace nor resolution. A ceasefire framework brokered in early 2025 established a fragile hostage-for-prisoner exchange and a reconstruction authority, but the physical and political infrastructure of Gaza has been largely destroyed. Over 70 percent of housing units are damaged or uninhabitable. The question of who governs Gaza — the Palestinian Authority, an international coalition, or a reformed Hamas — remains unresolved, and the vacuum has enabled militant splinter groups to operate.

The broader regional picture is defined by the Israel-Iran shadow war, which escalated into direct confrontation in 2024 when Israel struck Iranian military facilities in retaliation for an unprecedented Iranian ballistic missile barrage. Iran's proxy network — Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and the Iraqi Shia militias — has been degraded but not destroyed. Hezbollah, despite the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah and the destruction of significant munitions stockpiles, retains an estimated 100,000 fighters and has begun rebuilding its arsenal. The Houthis continue to disrupt Red Sea shipping, though a US-led naval coalition has reduced attack frequency. Iran's nuclear program remains the ultimate escalation risk: the IAEA reported in 2025 that Iran has accumulated enough enriched uranium for approximately six weapons if weapons-grade enrichment were pursued. The deterrence architecture that held for decades is fraying, and the absence of a credible diplomatic track between Israel and Iran increases the probability of miscalculation.

03 Taiwan Strait and the Indo-Pacific competition

The Taiwan Strait remains the world's most dangerous flashpoint, a theater where the interests of two nuclear-armed great powers converge on a single island democracy. China's military modernization, pursued under Xi Jinping's directive to achieve PLA readiness for a Taiwan contingency by 2027, has accelerated across every domain. The People's Liberation Army Navy now operates over 370 combat vessels, surpassing the US Navy in hull count, though not in tonnage or capability. The PLA Rocket Force has deployed over 1,300 short- and medium-range ballistic missiles targeted at Taiwan and regional US bases, and the DF-17 hypersonic glide vehicle represents a credible threat to carrier strike groups operating within the first island chain.

Taiwan's defense strategy has shifted from symmetric force-on-force confrontation to asymmetric deterrence — the "porcupine" approach. Taiwan has invested in mobile anti-ship missiles, sea mines, fast attack craft, and millions of drones. The United States has accelerated arms deliveries under the Taiwan Enhanced Resilience Act, though a 19 billion-dollar weapons backlog persisted into 2025. Japan's rearmament — the most significant military buildup since World War II, including the acquisition of 400 Tomahawk cruise missiles and the doubling of defense spending to 2 percent of GDP — reflects Tokyo's recognition that a Taiwan contingency is a Japan contingency. The Philippines has expanded US base access under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. The architecture of containment is visible, but the fundamental deterrence question — whether China would accept the costs of invasion or seek blockade and coercion — remains unanswered. A Chinese blockade of Taiwan would trigger a global semiconductor crisis, as the island produces over 60 percent of the world's advanced chips.

04 The Sahel and the African coup belt

The Sahel region — the semi-arid band stretching across Africa from the Atlantic to the Red Sea — has undergone a transformation that few predicted. Between 2020 and 2024, a cascade of military coups toppled governments in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Sudan, establishing what analysts call the "coup belt." The new military governments in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have expelled French counter-terrorism forces, terminated the UN MINUSMA peacekeeping mission, and formed the Alliance of Sahel States, a mutual defense pact that explicitly rejects Western security partnerships in favor of Russian engagement. The Russian paramilitary presence — formerly Wagner Group, now reorganized under the Russian Ministry of Defense as the Africa Corps — provides security assistance to coup governments in exchange for mining concessions and geopolitical access.

The security situation on the ground has not improved. Jihadist groups — including Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and the Islamic State Sahel Province — have expanded their territorial control. In Burkina Faso, over half the territory is outside government control, and internal displacement has reached 3.5 million people. In Sudan, the civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, which began in April 2023, has created the world's largest displacement crisis — over 10 million people internally displaced and 2.5 million refugees in neighboring countries. Famine was declared in parts of Darfur in 2024. The Sahel represents a convergence of climate stress, demographic pressure, state fragility, and great-power competition that the international system is poorly equipped to address.

05 Cyber and hybrid warfare: the invisible front

Conflict in 2026 extends across domains that traditional military doctrine struggles to categorize. Cyber warfare — once the domain of intelligence agencies conducting espionage — has matured into an instrument of strategic disruption. Russia's cyber operations against Ukrainian infrastructure, including the 2024 attacks on the Ukrainian power grid that caused rolling blackouts in Kyiv, demonstrated that cyber capabilities can produce kinetic-scale effects. China's cyber doctrine, under the Strategic Support Force reorganized in 2024 as the Cyberspace Force, Information Support Force, and Electronic Warfare Force, has shifted from intelligence collection to pre-positioning — infiltrating critical infrastructure networks in adversary countries to enable disruption in the event of conflict. The Volt Typhoon campaign, documented by the FBI and CISA in 2024, revealed persistent Chinese intrusions in US water, power, and transportation systems.

Hybrid warfare blends cyber with information operations, economic coercion, and proxy military action. Russia's influence operations targeting elections in NATO member states, documented by the EU's East StratCom Task Force, have evolved from crude social media manipulation to AI-generated deepfakes and synthetic media. Iran has conducted cyber attacks against Israeli and Gulf state infrastructure. North Korea's cryptocurrency theft operations, estimated to have stolen over 3 billion dollars in crypto assets since 2017, fund approximately half of its missile program. The attribution problem remains the central challenge: cyber operations are designed to be deniable, and the absence of a clear international legal framework for cyber conflict means that escalation thresholds are undefined. A cyber attack that disrupts a hospital or a power grid may be as deadly as a conventional strike, but it exists in a legal gray zone that invites escalation without clear rules of engagement.

06 The erosion of arms control: a post-treaty world

The architecture of arms control — the web of treaties that constrained nuclear weapons during and after the Cold War — is in a state of collapse. The New START Treaty, the last remaining bilateral nuclear arms control agreement between the United States and Russia, expired in February 2026 without replacement. Russia suspended its participation in 2023, and neither side negotiated a successor. The result is that for the first time since 1972, there is no legally binding limit on the strategic nuclear arsenals of the two powers that together hold approximately 90 percent of the world's nuclear weapons. Both are modernizing their forces: Russia is developing the Sarmat heavy ICBM and the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile, while the United States is producing the Sentinel ICBM and the B-21 Raider bomber.

The proliferation dimension is equally alarming. China is expanding its nuclear arsenal from approximately 500 warheads in 2024 to a projected 1,000 by 2030, according to the Pentagon's China Military Power Report. This represents the fastest peacetime nuclear expansion in history. North Korea maintains an estimated 50 warheads and has tested tactical nuclear delivery systems. Iran remains a threshold state. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, never entered into force, has been eroded by Russia's withdrawal of ratification in 2023. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was abandoned in 2019. The treaty-based arms control model that defined the post-Cold War security order is being replaced by an unregulated great-power competition in which the only constraints are self-imposed and unilateral. The risk of a new nuclear arms race — tripartite, involving the US, Russia, and China — is the defining strategic challenge of the decade.

07 The institutional crisis: can the post-1945 order hold?

Beneath the specific conflicts lies a systemic question: whether the international institutions built after World War II — the United Nations, the Bretton Woods financial system, the Geneva Conventions, the Non-Proliferation Treaty — can adapt to a multipolar world or whether they will be rendered obsolete by the power shifts they were designed to manage. The UN Security Council, frozen in its 1945 composition, has been paralyzed on every major conflict of the current era: Russia's veto blocks action on Ukraine, China's veto blocks action on Myanmar, and the United States' veto blocks action on Israel-Palestine. Reform proposals — expanding permanent membership to India, Brazil, Germany, and African representation — have been discussed for decades without progress, because the existing permanent members will not consent to dilution of their prerogatives.

The broader pattern is a shift from rules-based order to transactional bilateralism. Regional powers — Turkey, India, Saudi Arabia, Brazil — pursue independent foreign policies that resist alignment with either the Western or Chinese bloc. India buys discounted Russian oil while participating in the Quad. Saudi Arabia normalizes relations with China while maintaining its US security relationship. Turkey operates as a NATO member while purchasing Russian air defense systems. The result is a fluid, multipolar system in which alliances are situational and the enforcement of international norms depends on great-power consensus that rarely materializes. The conflicts of 2026 — in Ukraine, the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific, and the Sahel — are not isolated crises but symptoms of a transition between world orders, the outcome of which will determine whether the 21st century is governed by institutions or by raw power.