Futurist Parag Khanna fears we're already in third world war

The world is already fighting a third world war, according to the global strategist Parag Khanna, who says there is no reason to wait for historians to name it.

The shooting may be confined to pockets, but the global economy and trade system already look like a war zone, says the noted author and frequent Davos speaker.

“I’ll be honest with you, I actually think we are in World War III,” Mr Khanna told The National in Abu Dhabi this week. “I don’t want to wait till the year 2065 for historians to say, ‘And yes, in the mid-2020s there was World War III.’”

He said the conflict passes the test of a world war because “all major global powers are implicated directly or indirectly” and “the conflict theatres are interconnected”.

Those links are not always on the battlefield. “Look at the weapons transfers, look at the troop movements,” he said. “Look at the flows of oil, gas, commodities, gold, stockpiles,” he added, pointing to the North Korean soldiers sent to fight alongside Russian forces against Ukraine.

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‘US presence in the Gulf will change, not vanish’, says Parag Khanna

For the UAE, he said, this crisis is different from the ones before it. For five decades the country has been “the eye of the storm”, with each regional upheaval, from the Lebanese civil war to the Arab Spring, adding to its rise. “This is the first time the country’s being directly … hit and targeted, and that is what’s different,” he said.

He does not think that marks a turning point. “This is going to prove to be yet another episode where the UAE ultimately prevails and demonstrates its resilience.”

Lighter US footprint

Khanna expects a lighter US footprint in the Gulf. “We know that the bases that have been damaged through Iranian attacks are not going to be rebuilt,” he said. “That’s not where the US defence budget is going to go.”

But he warned against reading that as a retreat. US presence will be measured in cyber capabilities, missile defences and drones rather than bases and aircraft carriers. “I don’t believe that one can take a binary view on presence as if the US presence is going to disappear. It’s not. It’s still going to be very prominent.”

Bigger shift is east

Gulf trade and investment ties with East Asia have deepened since the commodity boom of the 2000s, and he called that story “pretty much irreversible”.

“When we do look back from the year 2050, we will not say that the rise of China was the biggest story of the first quarter of the 21st century,” he said. “We will say that it was the Asianisation of Asia.”

That shift will weigh on the dollar, which he described as “an example of inertia”. He expects its role to shrink as energy trade is repriced and central banks change how they hold reserves.

Khanna recalled a dispute with editors over the title of his book The Future Is Asian. “I have one quibble with this title,” he said. “And the quibble is that the present is already Asian. Asia is not waiting for western intellectuals or media to grasp this reality.”

Regional forum

Looking to 2027, he named unresolved border disputes as the biggest risk. So-called frozen conflicts are “just dormant”, he said, and tend to flare up “at a pretty inconvenient point”.

His answer is a regional security forum that brings together “all of the key players, from Israel to Iran, to Turkey, to Egypt, to the GCC countries, in one forum, not one that is dependent on or beholden to US foreign policy, or where China is pulling the strings”.

He pointed to Asean as a model. “I think it can be delivered in reality,” he said.

Khanna, who lives in Singapore, sees Abu Dhabi as the natural host. “Abu Dhabi is the Singapore of the Gulf region and the whole West Asian region,” he said.

“I don’t see any other capital that can deliver that, and that’s why I think of Abu Dhabi as much more than the federal capital of the UAE. I think of it as the de facto capital for the entire region.”