How to Use hot war in a Sentence

hot war

noun
  • Under the rigors of a live, hot war, these products break down.
    — Samanth Subramanian, WIRED, 5 Oct. 2023
  • In the early nineteen-nineties, each of these conflicts became a hot war.
    — Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, 29 Sep. 2023
  • Lukewarm statements that pretend as if there is no cold war perversely court a hot war.
    — Matt Pottinger, Foreign Affairs, 10 Apr. 2024
  • Under the rigors of a live, hot war, commercial products break down.
    — Samanth Subramanian, WIRED, 5 Oct. 2023
  • But a cold war, or a hot war, with a major foreign debt holder would be problematic.
    — Michael Taylor, San Antonio Express-News, 10 Feb. 2021
  • The experts assumed that this would soon change, and that they’d be mobilized in a hot war against malevolent fakers.
    — Daniel Immerwahr, The New Yorker, 13 Nov. 2023
  • Iran for 47 years now has been at war — with the United States, with Iraq, economic war and now hot war.
    — Mishal Husain, Bloomberg, 13 Mar. 2026
  • But Sternberg plays out a Cold War pantomime that parallels the hot war of male–female relations.
    — Armond White, National Review, 8 June 2022
  • That effort starts in Ukraine, where a hot war has been underway in the east for five years, and a cyberwar underway in the capital, Kiev.
    — David E. Sanger, New York Times, 14 Nov. 2019
  • The appointment would add to Trump’s growing list of Middle East advisors dealing with a region rocked by a hot war for over a year.
    — Laura Kelly, The Hill, 8 Jan. 2025
  • Of all the intractable issues that could spark a hot war between the United States and China, Taiwan is at the very top of the list.
    — Brendan Rittenhouse Green, Foreign Affairs, 16 June 2022
  • But against the backdrop of a hot war between Israel and Iranian proxy Hezbollah, Aoun declined the call.
    — Oren Liebermann, CNN Money, 17 Apr. 2026
  • Containing trade wars is a start, but Beijing and Washington should also work to end or at least contain hot wars that could trigger a much wider conflagration.
    — Odd Arne Westad, Foreign Affairs, 13 June 2024
  • The latter could mean a real hot war with China given the strategic importance of Taiwan’s semiconductor foundries.
    — Jim Cramer, CNBC, 14 Oct. 2024
  • As arguably the first hot war of the cold war, Korea was a proving ground for the US military and America’s sphere of influence.
    — Lauren Kane, The New York Review of Books, 14 May 2022
  • Reagan fought and won a cold war because even a successful hot war might have resulted in the annihilation of a significant portion of our population.
    — James Freeman, WSJ, 9 Mar. 2022
  • These moves would risk explicitly drawing the United States into the conflict and drawing us closer to a hot war between the world's two largest nuclear powers.
    — Isabella Murray, ABC News, 15 Mar. 2023
  • In addition, major hot wars, such as the one in Ukraine, cause supply chain disruptions that can have negative impacts on the growth and profitability of leading defense contractors.
    — Gurufocus, Forbes, 17 Dec. 2024
  • The concert worked well when members’ core interests aligned, but when the conservative consensus cracked, so did the concert, which erupted in a hot war over Crimea in 1853.
    — Michael Beckley, Foreign Affairs, 22 Aug. 2023
  • There are hot wars in Ukraine and Gaza, cold wars on the Korean peninsula and in the Taiwan Strait, and budding wars in Iran and parts of Africa.
    — Los Angeles Times, 10 Feb. 2026
  • This is particularly difficult in a hot war situation, like Ukraine, where weapons can go from concept to turners of the tide in a matter of weeks, and the other side must quickly invent countermeasures—or lose the war.
    — Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, 2 Aug. 2023
  • Yet deliberate hot war still ranks as the least likely of the five traps, because nuclear arsenals and deep commercial ties make escalation catastrophically expensive for both governments.
    — Newsweek Editors, MSNBC Newsweek, 14 May 2026
  • The Court of the 1960s clearly believed that the United States people could deal with Communist propaganda, even during the hot war of that time.
    — Anupam Chander, Wired, 21 Sep. 2020
  • When the occupant of the White House and the sycophants surrounding him are prepared to use anything, including real-world battles — trade wars and hot wars — to win a political battle at home, nothing and no one is safe.
    — Robert Reich, Anchorage Daily News, 28 Mar. 2018
  • Russia’s strongman has sent an alarming buildup of troops and weaponry to the front lines with Ukraine—an escalation that threatens the renewal of a hot war in Europe, with America and Russia on opposing sides.
    — Susan B. Glasser, The New Yorker, 8 Apr. 2021
  • The United States has powered through a change of power in Washington, a trade war, a hot war with Iran, a sharp round of monetary tightening, and an extended government shutdown without the engine giving out.
    — Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic, 24 May 2026
  • The same economy that has spent only two of the past 200 months in contraction is now staring down a hot war in the Persian Gulf, a fracturing trade system, and a Chinese president warning of moral as well as geopolitical collapse.
    — Nick Lichtenberg, Fortune, 14 Apr. 2026
  • And only when the construction of the Berlin Wall commenced in August of 1961 did an opportunity arise to hold a hot war at bay and stave off some of the era’s most catastrophic potentials, including a nuclear holocaust.
    — Dmitri Alperovitch, Foreign Affairs, 15 May 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'hot war.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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