The First World War did not begin because Europe’s great powers collectively decided, in a single moment, to launch a global conflict. European leaders did not gather in the summer of 1914 and deliberately choose a catastrophe that would kill millions, destroy empires and redraw the world map.
The crisis began with the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. What followed was the activation of a complex system of alliances, fears, military calculations and imperial ambitions that transformed a local crisis in the Balkans into a world war.
That is precisely why 1914 remains so relevant when examining the instability of today’s international system.
The comparison is not based on the idea that history repeats itself literally. Rather, it reflects a more troubling reality: major wars do not always begin because states consciously choose them. They can emerge from accumulated crises, miscalculations and decisions that the international system ultimately proves unable to contain.
The most important question today, therefore, may not be whether the United States, China or Russia actually wants a world war. Most likely, they do not.
The more urgent question is whether the international system has become less capable of preventing separate regional wars from converging into a single, much larger confrontation.
Global military expenditure reached approximately US$2.89 trillion in 2025, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, marking the eleventh consecutive year of increased military spending.
From The Sleepwalkers to Today’s World
In his well-known book The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, historian Christopher Clark offers an important interpretation of the origins of the First World War.
Rather than searching for a single country to blame entirely for the catastrophe, Clark traces a network of decisions and interactions that gradually pushed Europe’s powers towards war.
The importance of this interpretation for the present lies in how it changes the question.
Instead of asking who wants war, it asks something more complicated: how can states that do not want a comprehensive war nevertheless end up fighting one?
The contemporary world is not facing a single conflict. It is dealing with several simultaneous crises: the Russia-Ukraine war, the expanding confrontation in the Middle East, tensions over Taiwan and the South China Sea, and an accelerating arms race among the major powers.
These conflicts are not components of one existing world war and should not be treated as though they are.
The danger lies elsewhere.
Each crisis intersects, in one way or another, with the interests and alliances of the major powers.
Clark’s reading of 1914 therefore offers a warning about something different from deliberate war: a war produced by the failure of crisis management.
A World Rearming Itself
One indicator is particularly difficult to ignore: the sharp rise in global military expenditure.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, worldwide military spending reached approximately US$2.89 trillion in 2025, marking the eleventh consecutive annual increase.
Higher military expenditure does not mean that world war is imminent. States also arm themselves to deter adversaries and prevent attacks.
But it does reveal a deeper transformation: major powers increasingly perceive the international environment as less secure, making military power more central to their strategic calculations.
The paradox is that the pursuit of security can itself generate greater insecurity.
When one state increases its military capabilities to protect itself, a rival may interpret the same buildup as a threat and respond by expanding its own forces.
Both sides then enter what international relations theorists call the “security dilemma”: everyone arms in pursuit of greater security, yet the eventual result is that everyone feels less secure.
Some elements of this cycle are already visible.
Europe is expanding its defence capabilities because of fears surrounding Russia. Moscow, meanwhile, views NATO expansion as a threat to its own security.
The United States is strengthening its military presence and alliances across the Indo-Pacific to deter China, while Beijing views that deployment as an effort to encircle it and contain its rise.
Deterrence, if poorly managed by political leadership, can therefore become part of the very problem it is meant to solve.
The Ghost of 1914
The comparison becomes more compelling when examining the structure of the international system itself.
The world before the First World War was multipolar. Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary and other powers competed through overlapping alliances and rivalries.
Multipolarity itself was not the problem. The deeper weakness was the absence of sufficiently strong institutions capable of managing that competition.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has warned against assuming that the transition towards a multipolar world will automatically produce greater peace and stability.
He has invoked pre-First World War Europe as a warning of what can happen when several competing powers operate in a system without strong enough institutions to regulate their rivalry.
That warning carries particular weight today.
The unipolar order that emerged after the end of the Cold War is receding.
The United States remains the world’s leading military power, but it no longer operates in the same international environment that characterised the 1990s.
China has become an enormous economic and military power. Russia is attempting to redefine its geopolitical position and security sphere. Meanwhile, regional and middle powers are seeking greater strategic independence.
The problem is therefore not multipolarity itself.
The real question is whether international institutions are capable of managing the transition.
The Thucydides Trap: Is China the Germany of the 21st Century?
Another historical comparison is even more controversial.
In his book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, American scholar Graham Allison draws on the ancient Greek historian Thucydides and the war between Athens and Sparta to formulate the concept of the “Thucydides Trap”.
The idea is straightforward: when a rapidly rising power begins to threaten the position of an established dominant power, the risk of conflict increases.
Allison’s project examined 16 historical cases of this type over approximately five centuries. Twelve ended in war.
He therefore applies the question to the relationship between China and the United States: could China’s rise, combined with American fears of losing its dominant position, reproduce the same dynamic?
The comparison with Europe before 1914 is tempting.
Germany’s rapid rise in the late nineteenth century significantly altered the European balance of power and alarmed Britain and other states.
Today, China’s rise represents the most important long-term challenge to the position the United States has held within the international system since the end of the Cold War.
But this is precisely where historical comparison must be treated carefully.
The Thucydides Trap is not a natural law of international relations.
Allison himself stresses that war is not inevitable, noting that four of the 16 cases he studied did not end in war.
Reducing US-China relations to a simple confrontation between a rising power and a dominant one can also obscure major differences between the present and the past.
China and the United States are connected through economic, commercial and technological networks on a scale that had no equivalent in relations between Britain and Germany before 1914.
The existence of nuclear weapons also transforms the potential cost of war between them.
The real value of Allison’s argument therefore lies not in predicting that war is inevitable, but in warning that major shifts in the balance of power require exceptional political management if competition is not to become confrontation.
Three Flashpoints, One Test
If US-China competition represents the largest structural transformation in the international system, the most immediate danger comes from three flashpoints capable of testing whether the major powers can control escalation.
The first is Europe.
The Russia-Ukraine war has returned large-scale conventional warfare to the continent.
The danger extends beyond Ukraine’s borders. A miscalculation or military incident could produce direct friction between Russia and a NATO member state, potentially placing nuclear powers in a confrontation whose trajectory would be extremely difficult to control.
The second flashpoint is the Middle East.
Recent years have once again demonstrated how quickly regional conflicts can move beyond their original boundaries.
The region contains American, Russian, Chinese and European interests. Local conflicts intersect with international alliances, while the Middle East also controls critical sections of global energy and trade routes.
The US-Israeli war against Iran shifted the confrontation from deterrence and proxy conflict towards a more direct level.
Iran’s geography has also brought the Strait of Hormuz directly into the confrontation.
The significance of the strait is not merely military. It occupies a central position in the global energy and trade system.
Any prolonged disruption to navigation could therefore transform a regional war into an economic crisis with worldwide consequences.
This points to one of the defining characteristics of major war in the twenty-first century: a conflict may become global in its effects before becoming global in its battlefields.
The third flashpoint is Taiwan, which sits at the heart of US-China competition.
Any military crisis there would be more than a local conflict because of Taiwan’s position within the global technology economy and the competing security interests and commitments across East Asia.
A confrontation over the island would place the world’s two largest economic and military powers before a direct test of whether they can keep strategic competition below the threshold of war.
All three flashpoints do not need to erupt simultaneously for the world to enter a more dangerous phase.
The danger lies not merely in having three separate wars, but in the possibility that escalation in one theatre reshapes alliances and strategic calculations in the others.
Here the lesson of 1914 returns.
The crisis that ignites the international system is not necessarily the crisis that created its underlying contradictions.
The spark may be local, while the conditions that allow the fire to spread may have accumulated over years.
But This Is Not 1914
Historical analogy becomes dangerous when it stops being a tool for understanding and becomes a substitute for analysis.
Russia is not Tsarist Germany. China is not Imperial Germany. The United States is not Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century. Taiwan is not Sarajevo.
The world has also learned one extraordinarily important lesson since 1945: war between major powers in the nuclear age may have no victor.
Nuclear deterrence, despite its enormous moral and strategic risks, was one of the reasons the United States and the Soviet Union avoided direct military confrontation during the Cold War.
The modern international economy is also interconnected to an unprecedented degree.
A large-scale war between the United States and China would not remain confined to their armed forces. It would strike supply chains, financial markets, technology networks and global trade.
Today there are also institutions such as the United Nations, the G20, regional organisations and military and diplomatic communication channels.
These institutions suffer from deep weaknesses, but they nevertheless provide mechanisms for managing conflict that did not exist in the same form in 1914.
The lesson of historical comparison should therefore not be fatalism.
It should be the opposite.
A Crisis of the International System Before a Crisis of Wars
The most worrying indicator is not simply the number of wars taking place.
It is the decline in trust in the institutions and rules that are supposed to prevent them from merging into something much larger.
The UN Security Council repeatedly becomes paralysed when the interests of the major powers collide.
International law itself has become another arena of political contestation.
Who decides who the aggressor is? When is military intervention legitimate? Why are certain principles enforced forcefully in one crisis but applied selectively in another?
The danger of this double standard is not merely moral.
When states lose confidence in the ability of international institutions to protect them, they become more reliant on armament, alliances and their own military power.
When several states make that calculation simultaneously, the international system enters a cycle of mistrust that becomes increasingly difficult to reverse.
The crisis facing the world today may therefore be a crisis of the international system itself before it is simply a collection of separate wars.
Is History Repeating Itself?
History does not repeat itself literally, but it offers patterns that deserve serious consideration.
When the rise of new powers coincides with the relative decline of dominant ones, arms races accelerate, multilateral institutions weaken, regional wars expand and distrust grows among major powers, managing crises becomes more difficult.
The paradox is that the leading powers probably do not want a world war.
Washington does not want a direct war with Beijing or Moscow.
China does not need a world war to achieve its rise.
Russia understands the existential dangers that could result from a comprehensive confrontation with NATO.
But those facts alone are not sufficient grounds for reassurance.
One of the most important lessons from Christopher Clark’s study of 1914 is that understanding catastrophe does not necessarily require identifying one actor who deliberately decided to create it from the outset.
A catastrophe can emerge from a chain of decisions, each of which appeared reasonable or defensible to the actor making it at the time.
From Thucydides to Sarajevo, the lesson appears in different forms but remains fundamentally similar: changes in the balance of power become especially dangerous when political systems fail to manage them.
The question that should concern the world, therefore, is not simply when the Third World War might begin.
It is whether the political and institutional capacity still exists to prevent separate crises from merging into a major war.
The real danger is not that world war is inevitable.
It is that world war becomes possible while governments continue behaving as though it is impossible.
In 1914, the world did not lack politicians, diplomats, armies or alliances.
What it lacked at the decisive moment was the ability to stop the chain of escalation.
More than a century later, in a world that is more heavily armed, more interconnected and vastly more capable of destruction, that may be the historical lesson that cannot afford to be ignored.
