How likely is a major, three-way war?

Great Debates
1

This is a question I keep coming back to every now and then: how likely is a three way war, now, or at some point in our past or future? By that I mean there are three (or more) armies in the same area, each of which regards the others as shoot-on-sight hostile, and each is roughly as likely to encounter each other. Genuine multiway bloodshed between hostile armies.

I say major so as not to include tribal conflicts and civil wars, which can easily turn into conflicts between many rival factions.

It’s an idea that occurs regularly in fiction: Warcraft, Tom Clancy’s EndWar… Risk :), but how likely is it in real life? Historical examples more than welcome.

This type of conflict is uncommon, I imagine, because of the difficulty in fighting multiple adversaries, even with fighting between them. Usually the attitude is “my enemy’s enemy is my friend,” with the two that hate each other the least team up against the third, but if the hatred is perfectly balanced…

Another possibility is two enemies invading the same country, like in the game WWIII: Black Gold (Russia vs NATO fighting to take control of Iraq).

What do you think?

2

It happens in prison gangs and street gangs all the time, but I guess those are tribal factions. I have no examples off the top of my head involving nations.

3

I’d say fairly likely. It happened most recently during the Bosnian Civil War when Muslims and Croats and Serbs fought each other. I don’t know what you’d consider a major war, but it lasted for almost four years and caused more than 100,000 casualties so it wasn’t a small conflict by any means.