Modern Crises and the World War III Question: A Historical Assessment
- Riya Savadatti
- Jun 16
- 5 min read
There is a particular kind of vertigo that comes from reading history and feeling it describe the present. Pick up Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers, his meticulous account of how Europe stumbled into the First World War and you will find yourself underlining sentences not because they are about 1914, but because they feel uncomfortably relevant to 2025. Leaders operating on assumption rather than understanding. Alliances that constrain more than they protect. A system humming along until, quite suddenly, it isn't. Clark argued that the world was getting more like 1914, not less. He said that over a decade ago. It has not become less true since.
The question of whether we are heading toward a third world war has moved from the fringe to the mainstream. It is discussed in think tanks, cabinet rooms and with varying degrees of anxiety at dinner tables. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds to midnight in January 2025, the closest it has ever been to catastrophe. The following year, the 2026 statement confirmed that three separate conflicts involving nuclear-armed states were simultaneously threatening to escalate, with Russia-Ukraine, India-Pakistan, and Iran all generating nuclear brinkmanship within the same calendar year. This is not alarmism. It is arithmetic.
The Pattern We Keep Refusing to See
History rarely repeats itself exactly, but it does have recognisable rhythms. The decades before 1914 looked to those living through them, like a golden age. Trade was global, travel was easy, and the major powers had not fought each other directly in nearly half a century. The assumption that the system was too interconnected to collapse was itself one of the reasons it collapsed and no one took the necessary precautions because no one thought they were necessary.
The National WWII Museum has drawn a striking parallel in some respects, the pre-1914 world offers closer analogies to the present than the 1930s do. Prosperity had produced complacency. Nationalism was rising. And those who warned of danger were dismissed as catastrophists. The 1930s, by contrast, offer a different lesson and the consequences of choosing not to act once the signals became unmistakeable.
Yale professor Odd Arne Westad, writing in Foreign Affairs, argued that current US-China relations carry worrisome parallels to the miscalculations between Germany and Britain in the lead-up to 1914. He warned that China risks repeating one of Germany's central strategic errors which is standing by as a destabilising ally to then Russia, now Russia again which antagonises its neighbours while appealing to the language of international justice. These are not idle historical comparisons. They are the kind of pattern recognition that foreign policy depends on getting right.
The Architecture of Today's Danger
The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2025 identifies state-based armed conflict as the top current risk, ranked first by nearly a quarter of its expert respondents, a category that barely registered in the same survey two years prior. The UN Security Council, the body that was supposed to prevent precisely this kind of drift has not managed to halt the escalation of major conflicts, with peacekeeping operations shrunk from over 100,000 personnel in 2016 to around 68,000 by 2024. The institutions are not keeping pace with the instability.
The Eurasia Group, in its Top Risks 2025 report, described the current moment as being on par with the 1930s and the early Cold War in terms of danger, driven not by one dominant threat but by a "G-Zero" leadership deficit, where no single power or coalition is capable of stabilising the global order. Core international institutions like the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, all were built to reflect a balance of power that no longer exists.
Meanwhile, CSIS scenario analysis suggests that the most likely geopolitical outcome for the late 2020s is a "loose multipolarity" and not a stable bipolar Cold War, but a fragmented arena in which the US, China, Russia, India, and regional powers all push competing interests. Russia, in particular, is assessed as remaining the most disruptive actor regardless of outcome, with limited avenues for cooperation. What strategic theory calls "multipolar" is, in practice, a system full of veto points and short fuses.
Why This Time Might Be Different — And Why It Might Not
Every generation believes its crises are unprecedented. Some are right. The structural features of the current moment like nuclear proliferation without arms control frameworks, AI-enabled disinformation, climate stress multiplying instability in fragile states, and supply chains used as geopolitical leverage have no clean historical precedent. Russia suspended compliance with New START following its invasion of Ukraine. Its parliament voted to withdraw ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. These are not rhetorical moves. They are the systematic dismantling of the legal architecture built specifically to prevent the worst outcomes of great-power competition.
And yet the 1914 analogy has limits too. The American Enterprise Institute has pushed back on the idea that the First World War was simply an accident waiting to happen. The sleepwalker thesis that no one truly wanted the war understates the degree to which at least some actors were willing to run enormous risks. That insight matters now. Deterrence does not fail purely through accident. It also fails when one party calculates, correctly or not, that it can absorb the consequences of escalation. The question is not only whether leaders are sleepwalking, but whether some of them are walking with their eyes open.
What we are living through has been called a "polycrisis", a condition where multiple global crises interact and amplify each other across geopolitical, economic, ecological, and technological dimensions simultaneously. The Houthis disrupting Red Sea shipping lanes, reducing maritime traffic by over 70%, is not just a regional story it is a stress test of the same globalised interdependence that people once assumed would keep the peace. It failed that test quietly. No one called it a world war, but the effects have been felt from Rotterdam to Singapore.
The Question Worth Asking
The honest answer to whether a third world war is coming is probably not in the way we imagine it. Not because the risks are overstated, but because great conflicts rarely look like their predecessors. The Second World War did not look like the First. A future catastrophe might not look like either, it might be a cascade of regional escalations, nuclear posturing that crosses a threshold by accident, or a collapse of economic trust so severe that military confrontation becomes rational for actors who previously had no incentive for it.
What the historical record does tell us, clearly, is that the period of greatest danger is not the one in which everyone can see the threat. It is the one in which the warning signs are visible but the response is deferred because the system has not yet broken down completely and because the cost of action seems higher than the cost of waiting. That is where we are. The institutions are strained but standing. The conflicts are severe but contained.
In 1914, the failure was not a lack of information. The statesmen knew there was danger. The failure was a lack of imagination, an inability to picture, clearly and seriously, what losing control would look like. We have seen what it looks like. We have libraries full of it. The question is whether that knowledge will translate into different choices or whether we will have been, in the end, very well-informed sleepwalkers.
This article written by Riya Savadatti, student at Chanakya University, focusing on Bachelor's degree in Political Science and International Relations.
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