Stability only lasts until the alliance of nations supporting our global order is outweighed by those who don’t. Failure to address this transition and war is inevitable.
By any measure, the scales are tipping. Our world is enduring an increasingly grim chapter in our history with no stakeholder, no superpower no international alliance indeed no global institution (such as the UN) is in control of where our geo-politics is heading. This is why there is increasing talk of a world at war.
Alarmist? This is an understandable charge thrown at those like me who, for some time, have called for an increase in defence spending to 3 per cent GDP. But in our ever-complex inter-dependent world we simply cannot ignore the growing schism between those who respect our global order and those who not only ignore it but undermine the West’s appetite to defend it.
And those in the latter category, particularly China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, are increasingly rallying together, offering mutual support as they all pursue regional agendas that cumulatively test the West’s threshold to respond. Worse, this prompts many nations (crudely termed the Global South) to step back and avoid taking sides – unclear where all this is heading.
Parallels are drawn between now and the 1930's. "History doesn't repeat itself," said Mark Twain, "but it often rhymes".
Historical shifts in world order often follow a pattern, leading to epochal wars with the victors writing and upholding the new rules. But since the Cold War (the last time we avoided World War Three) we’ve become complacent in assuming we’d finally cracked it – not just securing relative world peace, and greater international engagement through globalisation but a happy embrace of liberal democracy. That this new era of stability would go unchallenged has proven to be an arrogant assumption shared by all those from Charles V through to Napoleon who thought their world order was unbeatable.
Our own era of recent stability is now over. The fear of a rising power by an established hegemon to often leads to conflict. The so-called Thucydides Trap.
The world is not (yet) at war, but we are not at peace. The blurring of state and non-state actors, rising discord in the grey zone and a progressive retreat from globalisation are already disrupting supply chains, access to markets and availability of critical materials and minerals. International security and our economy have never been so symbiotically linked.
You can read this article on GB News here: ‘WW3 is a realistic concern – Britain needs to step up,’ writes Tobias Ellwood (gbnews.com)