It is no secret that the world in general is not a very safe place right now, but just how bad is it?

“The world has always been messy,” said President Barack Obama in a joint news conference with the Netherlands at the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit at the Hague in the Netherlands.  To me, the three biggest issues and conflicts going on right now are taking place in the Ukraine, North Korea, and the Middle East.  However, I don’t think we understand the ramifications that come with these issues.

Let’s begin in the Ukraine, where things are just plain ugly.  Everyone has seen the news and can see that the situation is not a good one.  The Russians have no doubt crossed a line in more than one way with their invasion of eastern Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula, which is their main target.  What some people fail to recognize is that this is eerily similar to how World War I and II began, and history really does repeat itself.  President Obama talked about the United States potential involvement in the conflict.  “Russia is a regional power and is threatening some of its immediate neighbors not out of strength, but out of weakness,” he said.  “We have a considerable amount of influence on our neighbors.  We generally don’t need to invade them in order to have a strong cooperative relationship with them.”  Shots have been fired. Russia is not pleased.

Now to North Korea, where things have gone from bad to…completely ridiculous.  Dictator Kim Jong-un has made it clear in the past that he is just as crazy as his father was, and he never ceases to amaze us with his antics.  Recently, a rumor started stating that Kim Jong-un was requiring all men to get the same haircut that he has.  Whether or not this is true is highly debatable, but the fact that everyone immediately believed it shows that this man is no Mr. Rogers.

And finally we arrive in the Middle East, where things seem to have died down.  This may actually be the case or it may just be the fact that the media has been so focused on Ukraine and the missing Malaysian plane that they have forgotten about our Syrian friends.  Most recently, a Turkish jet shot down an Syrian war plane on Sunday because Syria entered Turkish airspace.  Not to mention that the civil war in Syria still is not over.

The world is far from peaceful, and if the state we are in today is any indication, peace is not something that we will be seeing any time soon.