The question, “Are we headed towards WW3?” has lost its sensationalism owing to its recurrence in the news media every time a missile is launched from Moscow to Kherson, Tel Aviv to Gaza, or Tehran to Tel Aviv. The sense of surprise behind the burning inquiry implies that people view each new act of irrational violence as an anomaly in an otherwise civilized world.
However, a cursory glance at modern history would reveal that militaristic state violence precedes these ‘headline wars’ in chronology and exceeds them in scope. Tens of thousands have died in the Sudanese civil war. Entire towns have been bombed in Myanmar by its military.
In Congo, dozens of armed groups control entire provinces. While none of these make it to the prime-time news, they all point to the same conclusion: global politics is now in a state of ‘free fall’. The post-Cold War international order, which promised the supremacy of diplomacy over deterrence, is crumbling at a rapid pace, and the world is slipping back into the form of geopolitical Darwinism that deemed restraint as weakness and militarism as national pride, erasing millions in the name of security and survival.
Despite having lost its shock value, the question about the possibility of another world war gains more relevance each day.
The Russian invasion of neighboring Crimea in 2014 took the world by surprise, shattering the illusion that post-war Europe was immune to land wars. With almost each passing year, the world kept becoming a more violent place. From the genocide in Myanmar, the fall of Kabul, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the Iran-Israel escalation to the involvement of the US, each incident was seen as an isolated eruption, a symptom of local instability, or old grudges reigniting.
However, taken together, all these instances represent something larger, something systematic: the slow breakdown of a global order that once promised stability through dialogue and restraint.
The fall of the Berlin Wall gave rise to a wishful optimism that global peace would no longer remain a moral ideal or a diplomatic struggle but become an inevitability—a self-reinforcing system. The sweeping tide of democratization would replace authoritarian regimes with open societies worldwide. The interconnected economies would view war as a liability and militarization as a bad investment.
Global institutions like the UN, WTO, and ICC would acquire greater writ and credibility among the nations of the world, transforming them into guardians of peace, development, and justice.
The current global political order, however, presents a sharp contrast to all these expectations. Countries are not investing in multilateral stability but rather preparing for survival.
In 2022, Japan announced its most significant military buildup since the end of World War II, marking a significant departure from its decades-old policy of pacifism. Alarmed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Germany committed €100B to military rearmament. Under the slogan of “Atmanirbhar Bharat,” India has been aggressively modernizing its military equipment production to promote self-reliance while also aiming to increase its regional arms exports. Iran, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea are becoming increasingly desperate to acquire nuclear capability.
The resurgence of authoritarian regimes and populist militarism in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Egypt, and the African Sahel region has unraveled the dream of a democratic utopia. The consistent failure of international institutions to safeguard the security and financial interests of smaller nations against bigger powers has exposed their partisan and ceremonial nature.
Whether in Africa, Asia, or the Middle East, countries have recognized that security must be homegrown or acquired through regional alliances and have therefore been inclined to align themselves with regional alternatives, such as BRICS, OPEC, and ASEAN.
All these structural indicators mimic the political atmosphere of the 1930s, and once again, a multipolar world is being stitched together, not out of solidarity, but out of survival.
The mainstream geopolitical commentary sees the current chaos and the decline of the Cold War global order as unexpected, tragic, and circumstantial. However, a deeper reflection on history reveals that it might be a structural consequence of the worldwide realpolitik that treated democracy as a means to an end, rather than a means of achieving peace.
A strategy for containment, expansion, and market stability designed by powerful nations, particularly European empires and later the US, to secure their material interests.
Critics have argued that the Western powers embarked on the project of global democratization for the same reasons they had gone to war with the whole world: profit-making. The enforcement of democracy and peace through force facilitated the smooth implementation of economic liberalization, ensuring easy access to cheap labour, new consumers, and raw materials for the West.
But the rise of Pacific economies has nullified that incentive by undercutting the Western industries on major products, leveraging their cheap labor, technological advancement, and national reserves of key raw materials. The policy of trade liberalization that once favored the West now acts as a catalyst for the growth of its competitors. In this new context, war or the threat of war has once again become lucrative.
The disruption of global conflicts fuels the sales of arms, tightens political allegiances, and derails the rivals’ momentum. Hence, the same powers that once championed the cause of globalization are either playing a key role in dismantling it or witnessing as passive observers as the world becomes more divided by the day.
The prospect of war has regained the strategic and economic utility that it had during the two great wars or even earlier, during the times of colonization.
What we witness every few months now are not isolated episodes of conflicts in the global arena but the erosion of the very logic that restrained them. Peace is not profitable anymore, and what replaces it could reset the clock of world history, dragging us back into the era of geopolitical Darwinism.
