Ukraine and North Korea launch drones while China sends an aerial armada towards Taiwan.

(Originally published Dec. 27 in “What in the World“) Having secured U.S. promises to send his nation its most sophisticated anti-missile system, Raytheon’s MIM-104 Patriot surface-to-air missile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has stepped up homemade drone attacks on bases inside Russia.

The attacks appear to be aimed at disrupting Russia’s ability to bombard Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, notably its power and water supplies. And The New York Times continues to repeat the disturbing rationale that Ukraine feels it can launch these attacks because there’s little Moscow can do beyond what it has already done—short of launching a nuclear strike. Cold comfort. Moscow meanwhile has announced it will begin outfitting its long-range bombers with hypersonic missiles.

Washington, meanwhile, has taken semantic cover, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken arguing that Ukraine’s use of homemade drones to attack inside Russia means that the U.S. hasn’t violated President Joe Biden’s promise not to “enable or encourage” Ukraine to do so. So Russian President Vladimir Putin can’t use the attacks to justify escalating the war to attack the U.S. or Ukraine’s neighbors in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It’s a good thing that Putin is known to be such a stickler for playing by the rules.

But to determine just how much more likely these attacks are to result in an escalation of the war, we need to ask ourselves: under what circumstances would the U.S. now curtail its support of Zelensky? After his triumphant address to a U.S. Congress that has showered him with $100 billion in aid so far, it’s difficult to think of any. Any reasonable person in Zelensky’s shoes, responsible for their nation’s survival, would do whatever it took to get the 800-pound U.S. gorilla to intervene more directly to push Russia out and end the slow exsanguination of Ukraine that’s now underway. Lob an American-made missile at a Russian staging post across the border? In a heartbeat.

Speaking of drones, North Korea on Monday managed to send five drones across the demilitarized zone into South Korea, with one penetrating as far as Seoul. In response, South Korea scrambled its air force and launched its own drones into North Korea.

China stepped up its own aerial assaults, too. As if reopening its borders to unleash a massive counterattack of new Covid infections upon the world wasn’t aggressive enough, China on Monday launched a wave of 71 aircraft—a record number—into the air defense identification zone of “renegade province” Taiwan. More than 40 of the aircraft crossed the median line that has informally separated them across the 180km Taiwan Strait.

It wasn’t immediately clear how the incursion might coincide with recent China-Russia naval exercises in the East China Sea or the voyage of the Chinese aircraft carrier group Liaoning into the Philippine Sea. But it did seem clear that the aerial armada had at least something to do with Congress’ passage of $10 billion in accelerated military aid for Taiwan in its record, $858 billion defense budget for 2023.

Cyberspace is also emerging as a powerful front in the new Cold War. With state-led attacks increasing, insurers are increasingly rejecting claims for cyber attacks as “acts of war.”