The dominos are wobbling
One war drains the arsenal. Another draws in capitals. A third is being prepared. The international security system is not failing — it is being dismantled, piece by piece, and nobody in power seems to want to say so out loud.
Read the news from the past 48 hours and you see a pattern that the headlines, taken one by one, manage to hide. So let me lay them out flat.
The United States has just fought a 38-day bombing campaign against Iran — Operation Epic Fury, they called it — and fired more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles in the process. That is more than a decade’s worth of peacetime procurement burned through in just over a month. The CSIS analysis released Wednesday says replenishing those stockpiles will take until 2030 or 2031. The same report warns that the window of vulnerability this creates is “a major concern” for a potential Pacific conflict. The Pentagon’s acting comptroller told lawmakers the war has cost roughly $29 billion so far, and the bill is not closed yet.
Now, while the ammunition shelves are still bare, President Trump has threatened to bomb Oman — a country that has been serving as the diplomatic backchannel between Washington and Tehran. The Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes, would become a combat zone. The Iran war, which the ceasefire was supposed to pause, is threatening to widen rather than end.
Meanwhile, Israel is fighting on two fronts at once.
On Tuesday, Israeli forces struck the Lebanese capital in what they called a “targeted strike.” The same day, attacks on southern Lebanon killed at least 16 people. In Gaza, the new head of Hamas’s military wing was killed by an Israeli strike. At least 10 people died in a separate attack on Gaza City — four of them children. Israel’s defense minister announced that large-scale Palestinian migration from Gaza “will go ahead,” which is an official telling you, in plain words, that a population is being moved.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. And the most dangerous part is not any single event — it is what they add up to.
The American security guarantee that Europe has relied on for 75 years is being quietly unwound.
According to a Spiegel report confirmed by Reuters, the United States has told NATO allies it intends to cut in half the number of strategic bombers it makes available to the alliance in a crisis. Fighter jets will drop by a third. The Navy will provide fewer destroyers. Submarines: zero. The American envoy who delivered this news in Brussels last week, Alexander Velez-Green, also announced that the US will scale back its provision of armed reconnaissance drones and stop supplying certain categories of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft — forcing Europe to buy its own.
A NATO spokeswoman said there had been an “over-reliance” on the United States. That is the diplomatic way of saying: you’re on your own now.
And this arrives at the exact moment when Latvia is rushing mobile intercept units to its border with Russia after drone incursions, when the Arctic is heating up militarily, when an all-female Senate delegation just visited the High North because the region has become a flashpoint. The timing could not be worse if it had been designed to be.
Over in the Indo-Pacific, the other superpower is reading the room.
China’s analysts have interpreted the Trump-Xi summit as a power-shift moment — meaning they believe the balance has moved in their favor. Beijing is quietly pivoting to Central Asian gas, reducing its dependence on sea lanes the US Navy controls. Its AI governance push is being framed as a global standard that challenges American tech leadership. And there are credible reports that Xi Jinping is preparing to visit Pyongyang — a trip that would be read in Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington as a signal of deepening coordination between China and North Korea, at a moment when North Korea has just fired close-range ballistic missiles and is deepening its wartime partnership with Russia.
The dominoes, in other words, are wobbling on three continents at once.
And the system that is supposed to catch them when they fall is shrinking.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reports that UN peacekeeping troop numbers have fallen to their lowest level in at least 25 years. This is happening while the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo — which the WHO now calls a “catastrophic collision” of disease and conflict — is outpacing the response. While more than 500 people have died of measles in Bangladesh. While Somalia’s pirates are returning to the shipping lanes. The institutions built to manage crises when they overflow national borders are being hollowed out at precisely the moment they are most needed.
You can call this multipolarity if you like fancy words. But what it looks like on the ground is this: the United States is overextended and drawing down its commitments. Europe is being told to fend for itself before it is ready. The Middle East is burning in two separate wars that keep intersecting. China is watching and calculating. And the global bodies meant to step into the gaps are starved of resources and troops.
This is not a prediction of collapse. It is a description of the present.
The question nobody in power is answering is not whether the dominos will fall. It is what happens when several of them fall at the same time, in different directions, and the people who used to stand between them have stepped back.
Sources: CSIS: Rebuilding US Missile Inventory (May 28, 2026); Military Times (May 27, 2026); Reuters: US plans NATO cuts (May 26, 2026); The Guardian: Trump threatens Oman (May 28, 2026); Reuters: Hamas chief killed (May 27, 2026); The Guardian: Israel defense minister on migration (May 28, 2026); SIPRI: Peacekeeping in Peril (May 2026); Reuters: Xi may visit Pyongyang (May 20, 2026)