Jeremy Bowen: The world is more dangerous today than I can ever remember The world is at another moment of transformation; we see it everywhere. The political and economic turmoil that drives people towards rich countries where increasingly they are not welcome. Climate change that is doing much more damage than simply ruining holidays in Europe’s burning tourist hotspots. The power of asymmetric warfare to confound the superpowers. In the Oval Office sits a president driven by vanity and instinct, and surrounded by a court of advisers who know better than to question his decisions or challenge him with inconvenient truths. Iran has demonstrated the vulnerability of the world economy to the weaponisation of geography. Blocking the Strait of Hormuz put a chokehold on the global economy. Americans who already feel hard up are spending more on petrol and might take their revenge on the president at the midterm elections in November. Worldwide, the longer trade is paralysed; more people will go hungry as farmers lack fertiliser. Global supply chains are more interdependent, and vulnerable, than they were even at the turn of the century. The world’s other chokepoints await the next big crises. The Strait of Malacca, which connects the Pacific and the Indian Oceans, is less than two miles wide at its narrowest point. One fifth of world trade, estimated at $2.45trn by one think tank, passes through the Taiwan Strait every year. It is around 100 miles wide, but if China ever took military action against Taiwan, it would be the main theatre of war. Economic disruption is bad enough on its own. But it also feeds in to a world of suspicion and populist politics that is sharpening fears of war between the great powers. It seemed unthinkable in the Cold War, impossible in the West’s warm glow after the fall of the USSR, but stopping one happening might be the biggest challenge any leader will face in the second quarter of this century. After Vladimir Putin threatened “consequences that you have never faced in your history” to anyone who intervened against his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Joe Biden posted on X that “a direct confrontation between Nato and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent.” Putin has reprised versions of his warning since then. It is largely seen as a bluff, and has not stopped Western military aid to Ukraine, but it slowed it down. With the Kremlin under unprecedented pressure now that Ukrainian drones are striking deep inside Russia, some strategists are discussing whether his threats are less of a bluff than some assume. @BowenBBC newstatesman.com/politics/20…