The world is a powder keg waiting to explode

Telegraph

07-05-2025

Progress, what progress? On the 80th anniversary of VE Day, the world is edging ever closer to another apocalyptic conflagration, with India-Pakistan the latest terrifying escalation. Pax Americana has been shattered, never to return, and with it the delusions of Western modernity.
In eerie parallels to the 1930s, rogue actors are initiating a series of interlinked conflicts around the world that, thanks to a web of alliances, risk joining up into one hideous global war.
We don't yet know whether the massacre of Indian tourists in Kashmir by terrorists will prove to be the casus belli, or whether it might be precipitated by another outrage by Vladimir Putin, or whether the tipping point will be triggered by Iran's genocidal mullahs developing a nuclear bomb and using it. We may have to wait for China to invade Taiwan, or perhaps for an entirely different despot to make his move. What is almost certain is that conflict, perhaps even one future historians will describe as World War III, is coming, and there appears to be nobody, no mechanism, no alliance, to stop it.
The situation feels hopeless. The Long Peace, as John Lewis Gaddis called it, was an accident of history, a one-off consequence of America's fleeting supremacy and the Cold War, not, as hubristic Western elites convinced themselves, the byproduct of an inevitable ascent of humanity from superstition to reason.
Multipolar chaos has filled the vacuum left by America's retreat: there is no longer a global policeman. The legacy post-WWII global institutions, and the liberal, technocratic project they were meant to underpin, have been exposed as utterly useless, only viable under Pax Americana. International bodies have become ineffective, corrupt or captured, with international law (policed by the dreadful ICC), agencies (such as UNRWA) and treaties (such as the Paris Accords) routinely weaponised against the West by Marxists, Orientalists and clever third world statesmen. The EU is destroying its economies and societies. The Global South is laughing at the decadent West, including at Donald Trump's naivety, and China's President Xi is meeting his new vassal Vladimir Putin.
America is no longer rich, strong or capable enough to keep the peace, and it wouldn't want to even if it could. Its efforts to do so after 9/11 ended in catastrophe, as did its meddling in Libya and elsewhere. Its confidence and attention span are shot. Years of over-consumption, profligacy and under-production have made it too dependent on inflows of funds that come with geopolitical strings attached. Its over-indebtedness and unfunded liabilities are its Achilles' Heel. Trump voters no longer want to serve as cannon fodder in forever foreign wars. His project is very much a defensive retreat, the winding down of the Great American empire, combined with a MAGA version of the Monroe doctrine, which asserts Washington's sole influence over the Americas (including Panama, Canada and Greenland).
He also wants to prevent a Chinese takeover of the Pacific. He isn't really interested in much else, hence why he has been so keen to believe the lies Putin, Iranians and Houthis have been telling him. With the Europeans having spent the past 30 years squandering the peace dividend, we have ended up with a fractious Western pseudo-alliance excessively focused on counter-insurgency, that has fallen behind in the tech wars and that is physically unable to produce enough missiles or weapons. The collapse in war-fighting capacity has been staggering. Combined with the pathologies of multiculturalism, especially in Britain and Europe, and the rise of pacifism and a woke, anti-patriotic, Western self-hatred, we are even less fighting fit than we were prior to rearmament in the 1930s.
The very opposite is true of our adversaries. The explosion of wealth in the Global South after it adopted versions of capitalism, while wonderful for life expectancy and quality of life, didn't bring about the Westernisation of their societies that virtually all liberals had predicted. Prosperity and the internet were meant to make wars and authoritarian rule unthinkable. It didn't work out that way.
China hasn't embraced democracy and individual liberty; instead, it weaponised its wealth to become the second most powerful military power in the world and its technology to become a vicious surveillance state. The richer it grows, the more dangerous it becomes. Thomas Friedman's Golden Arches theory of conflict prevention, which posited that two countries with a McDonald's would never fight a war, was disproved in Kosovo in 1999, and when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Woke imbeciles pretend only the West is expansionist or racist, but of course that isn't true. Today, Russia wants Ukraine, China wants Taiwan, and Iran, funder of Hamas and Hezbollah, wants to control the Middle East, destroy Israel and ethnically cleanse all minorities. The fusion of imperialism with ethnic hatred is as toxic today as it was in the 1930s.
The balance of power is further complicated by the rise of asymmetric warfare: drones in particular can inflict immense damage on supposedly stronger countries, level the playing field and further destabilise the world. It is just a matter of time before a drone causes an event of a magnitude similar to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914.
There were many smaller conflicts before the Second World War, such as the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the Anschluss. We can see similar warning signs today, starting with Putin's invasion of Crimea in 2014 under Barack Obama, a seminal moment in the world's descent into disorder. The period since 2021 has been the bloodiest since the Cold War. The Tigray War in Ethiopia, Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Hamas' assault on Israel, have reversed the downward trend in deaths from war.