The brutal conflict between Israel and Hamas has been fueling violence and instability in the Middle East. Fortunately, East Asia is not at war, though definitely not at peace either as China compels its neighbors and accumulates military power at a historical pace. Many Americans might be unaware of how close the world is to being devastated by intense and overlapping conflicts, perhaps due to forgetting how the last global war emerged, writes Hal Brands, Professor at Johns Hopkins University and Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, in his analysis published in the pages of Foreign Affairs.