There are concerns among many that the crisis in the Middle East sparked by the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, and the subsequent ongoing war in Gaza, could be the early stages of a world war.

And while it certainly has all the makings of the first major Middle Eastern modern regional war, it doesn’t yet have enough combustible power to ignite a world war. And, yes, that’s despite the killing on Saturday of three U.S. service personnel and the injuring of dozens more in a drone attack in Jordan, near the Syrian border, which the White House blames on Iranian-backed radical groups operating in Iraq and Syria.

However, it could easily prove to be one of several major regional fronts around the world in which revisionist powers push back, perhaps decisively, against the U.S.-led “rules-based order.”

A regional war emerging out of the Gaza crisis would essentially pit Iran—a second-tier but highly aggressive revisionist and revolutionary power committed to overturning the regional and global balance of power—against a loose network of status quo-oriented countries aligned with Washington.

If the various simmering fronts that have opened up in the Middle East—particularly at the Israel-Lebanon border, in the Red Sea, and through attacks on U.S troops and facilities by pro-Iranian radicals—should erupt in a major regional confrontation, even if it's a series of interconnected rather than fully integrated conflicts, the outcome could easily prove as decisive to the trajectory of international relations as the war in Ukraine and growing tensions over Taiwan.

An Israeli army soldier gestures while seated in the turret of a battle tank moving at a position along the border between southern Israeli and the Gaza Strip on January 31, 2024 amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

Already, Moscow and Beijing are quite firmly on Tehran’s side in the confrontation with Washington, and there is little doubt that all four countries understand the potential macro-historic stakes involved should the Middle East ignite.

Thus far, the Israel-Hamas conflict has remained largely contained to Gaza, which is certainly a limited and tenuous, but significant, success for the Biden administration’s policy priorities on the crisis.

In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacres, Biden made it quite clear that his focus was on containing the conflict to Gaza and preventing a cascade of circumstances developing that could drag Hezbollah (and ultimately Washington or Tehran, or both) into full-blown conflict.

For the first month or so, this appeared to be successful. The administration combined a bear-hug of support for Israel on Gaza with a strong restraining hand preventing a “preemptive” attack against Hezbollah in Lebanon—as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant was pressing for around Oct. 11. And the naval buildup in the eastern Mediterranean sent a strong message, if one were needed, to Hezbollah (and ultimately, Iran) that the Lebanese group had better stay out of the fray.

Having apparently succeeded in containing the conflict, team Biden turned its attention increasingly towards pressuring Israel to adopt less scorched-earth tactics as the war moved into Gaza’s south. But in recent weeks, that success looks increasingly fragile. Conflicts and confrontation have greatly intensified on three key fronts, with Biden’s goal of conflict containment being challenged by friend and foe alike.

At the Israel-Lebanon border, the expected flashpoint, it isn’t the U.S. antagonist and Hamas ally, Hezbollah, which is escalating at every turn, but Israel.

Indeed, from the outset, Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, made it clear to the trained observer in both word and deed that they wanted nothing to do with another war with Israel under these circumstances.

That’s hardly surprising. Suffering from economic meltdown, political paralysis, and state dysfunction, Lebanon is in no position to sustain even a........

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