A third world war is plausible. Here’s how to avoid one

One disquieting lesson of history is that, although world wars affect nearly everyone, the task of avoiding them falls to a tiny number of decisionmakers. And those decisionmakers are sometimes fools.

Today’s world looks “quite a bit” like the world before 1914, argues Odd Arne Westad, a professor of history at Yale, in “The Coming Storm”. Great powers are seeking to dominate their backyards. An era of globalisation is giving way to one of rising nationalism. Growing numbers of people are blaming other countries for their problems. Indeed, mutual suspicion is even worse now than it was on the eve of the first world war. Two in five Americans think their country will go to war with China in the next five years; two-thirds of Russians believe that the war in Ukraine is a “civilisational struggle” with the West.

In 1914 some leaders were both belligerent and overconfident. Take Kaiser Wilhelm II. When his friend Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated by a Bosnian Serb, his advisers urged him to show restraint. Instead the Kaiser furiously declared that Serbia was a sponsor of terrorism that needed “sorting out—and soon”. Assured of German backing, Austria-Hungary waged war on Serbia, without clear objectives.

The Kaiser thought a short, sharp war would reshape the Balkans to Germany’s advantage and boost his own standing at home. He doubted that many other countries would get involved. He went on holiday just beforehand, leaving instructions that Germany would support Austria “if complications arose”. He failed to plan for the predictable consequences of his actions, let alone for a global conflict that claimed tens of millions of lives and toppled four empires, including his own.

Today it is “hard to argue that our leaders are better…than those who governed prior to 1914”, writes Mr Westad. Certainly, there is poor judgment in high places. Vladimir Putin thought he could conquer Ukraine in a few days; four years later, more Russians have died in his vanity war than in all wars since 1945. Donald Trump thought war with Iran would be easy; it has shaken the global economy and does not appear to have made America safer.

The recent global resurgence of nationalism has pre-1914 echoes, too. The strain that gripped Germany then “was particularly virulent because it combined a faith in the virtues of the nation with a degree of state worship and a cult of military power”. That sounds a lot like modern China and exactly like modern Russia.

Nationalism blends explosively with fear. In the early 1900s the imperial superpowers (Britain and France) feared the rise of a rapidly industrialising power (Germany), which in turn suspected that the old powers wanted to encircle it and strangle its growth. This is how America and China see each other today.

“The Next World War” by Peter Apps, a journalist at Reuters, complements Mr Westad’s book, adding vivid reporting to scholarly rigour. Mr Apps highlights the oddness of the leaders with the biggest nuclear arsenals. Mr Putin, isolated in his bunker during covid-19, wrote an eccentric screed citing a 9th-century Viking warlord to explain why he needs to rule Ukraine. Mr Xi was beaten and humiliated as a teen during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and even denounced by his mother. Could this partly explain his obsession with reversing China’s “century of humiliation”?

As for Mr Trump, few leaders are so perilously unaware of what they do not know. As a 38-year-old property dealer, Mr Trump thought he should be in charge of America’s nuclear negotiations with the Soviet Union, Mr Apps notes. “It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” Mr Trump said. “I think I know most of it anyway.”

It is on the calm, sober judgment of such men that the prevention of great-power conflict depends. And the advance of technology may force them to make decisions very quickly. History suggests this could be a problem. One reason why Europe raced to war in 1914 was that both sides knew that whoever mobilised faster would have an advantage: Prussia had crushed France in 1870-71 by using newfangled railways to rush a huge army to the front before the French were ready. This knowledge shrank the time available for diplomacy “to a minimum”, says Mr Westad. Today nuclear weapons and AI could shrink it from weeks to minutes.

Another challenge is personalised rule. Mr Putin, Mr Trump, Mr Xi and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un all nurture personality cults, presenting themselves as all-but-infallible strongmen. “Personal rulers often…fear the perception of weakness more than…the consequences of war,” says Mr Westad. He could have added that strongmen tend to be corrupt and may hope that a quick, victorious foreign war will distract public attention from their predations at home. A study by Karolina MacLachlan and others for Transparency International, a watchdog, finds that “corruption helps create the conditions for conflict.”

Mr Westad offers advice for avoiding another megawar. Leaders should have speedy and secure means of communication, and meet in person regularly. This may sound basic, but China has recently refused to pick up calls from the Pentagon.

To build trust—and for its own sake—great powers should co-operate where possible, for example on climate change, pandemics and exploring space. On inflammatory yet intractable issues of sovereignty, they should seek temporary compromise. For instance, over Taiwan, America should promise not to support formal independence for the self-governing island so long as China does not invade it.

All sound ideas, but all depend on leadership. Wise leaders “know how to deter, how to buy time, how to avoid uncontrollable escalation”. They should understand—and care—about the suffering that war entails. Mr Putin clearly does not, judging by his recklessness with Russian lives, let alone Ukrainian ones. Mr Xi is harder to read. But it is troubling, notes Mr Apps, that Chinese military planners studying Ukraine “put almost no effort at all into looking at how conflict might have been avoided; instead they focused purely on…lessons [for winning] a future war.”

Mr Apps puts the odds of another world war in the next decade at 30-35%. Some may argue that is too gloomy. Mr Putin will not live for ever. China may grow milder as it ages. Mr Trump is clearly wary of clashing with a great power and “gambling with world war three”. Yet he is fond of bullying smaller countries. And as 1914 showed, small wars can become big ones. ■