Is a third world war coming? This was the question a friend of mine in his late 20s asked me when we woke up on 14 April to the news that Iran had launched over 300 drones and missiles towards Israel.

Apart from video war games, the young man has not seen any wars. Nigeria’s civil war ended nearly two-and-a-half decades before he was born. Of course, you don’t have to experience war to feel it. There’s a sense, for example, in which the more recent wars in the West African subregion or the more distant ones in north-eastern Africa or Europe tend to reach us, wherever we are.

Our televisions and phones bring the horrors of war right into our living rooms. A generation for which these smart devices have become a playground is right to be concerned that the flare-up in the Middle East could lead to something more serious.

Apart from the war in Ukraine and the underreported conflicts in South Sudan and Central Africa, no other war in recent times has riveted the world like the one in Gaza. For all the talk about the potential escalation into a wider regional conflict, it didn’t seem likely that the Israel-Palestinian war would spread beyond shadow attacks by Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies until an Israeli air strike killed seven Iranians and six Syrians in the Iranian Embassy in Damascus.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Middle East crisis news hub

An unusual response

That was when the threat of escalation became real. Not even during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 did Iran, a regional power, take direct aim at Israel the way it did in its revenge attack on 14 April. If half the drones and missiles aimed at Israel had hit their target, Israel would be reeling from devastation worse than anything that happened on 7 October. The world might have been a different place today.

It may be convenient to dismiss concerns about a possible outbreak of a third world war as far-fetched, and perhaps even childish. Yet, remembering a few of the things that led to two world wars might help us not to take too much for granted.

The immediate cause of World War 1, for example, was the murder in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist, prompting the Austro-Hungarian empire, supported by Germany, to declare war on Serbia. Russia, Serbia’s ally, joined. It wasn’t long before Germany declared war on Russia and invaded France, drawing Britain into the war.

Of course, the murder of the Archduke may have been the tipping point, but a web of other factors also contributed, from the competition for territories and economic rivalries to militarism, and from the unstable alliances to the crisis in the Balkans. The Sarajevo murder was only the last straw.

Rules-based system

God knows just how many more straws before we reach another breaking point. We like to think that we have a rules-based system; that the world is wiser today, restrained as much by competing interests as it is by the assurance of mutual destruction.

The two world wars claimed the lives of a population nearly the size of Ethiopia’s 120 million and left millions more ruined forever. And yet, over the last two years, we have seen signs that the world is going mad again, starting with the Russia-Ukraine war.

If by the death of one man — the Archduke — the world descended into chaos, was it irrational to fear that Israel’s killing of 13 people, including seven Iranians in Iran’s embassy in Damascus and the destruction of the embassy was sufficient to spark a wider regional conflict? Has anything really changed or has the world learnt anything new 110 years after World War 1?

Fewer warmongers?

Some studies suggest so. One interesting study, for example, points to demographics as a good predictor of civil conflicts. The study, famously called the “youth bulge” suggests a strong correlation between countries prone to civil conflicts and those with fast-growing youth populations. So, the older the population, the theory goes, the less likely its appetite for a hot war.

It suggests that despite the sabre-rattling in the world’s former war-mongering capitals — Washington, Berlin, London, Paris, Tokyo and Moscow — the dominance of older, wealthier populations in these countries combined with concerns about managing their ageing populations has reduced their appetite for war.

A few like the US, Britain and France, may press the world to the edge of a frenzy with the sort of disgraceful complicity seen in the Middle East. But just before madness finally takes over, the theory argues that the leadership in countries with older, wiser populations would dial back and make the kind of last-minute call to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that saves the world for another day.

There have also been those, like foreign affairs columnist, Jonathan Power, who argue that despite the Russia-Ukraine war, the war in Gaza, and the under-reported deadly conflicts in South Sudan and Yemen, the world has never been at greater peace with itself than it is.

Although Ukraine is not too far from becoming a meat grinder and the death toll in Gaza has topped 32,000 (minus hundreds unaccounted for) studies suggest that, thanks to the better angels of our nature, there has been a reduction in battle deaths per 100,000 in state-based conflicts since the Second World War.

Spells of peace

War historians say that outside the Pax Romana and the Golden Age of Islam, the post-World War 2 era is probably the most peaceful time in world history.

A number of other reasons have also been given why a third world war is improbable. It’s believed that the end of colonialism, the prioritisation of human rights, the general rise in global prosperity/literacy, and particularly the establishment of the United Nations, have accounted for the longest spell of peace in human history and might yet keep the world from descending into another catastrophic war.

Maybe — and that’s a big maybe. The safeguards of our sanity are already fraying at the edges and we may just have entered a violent new era.

If after 77 years, Israel will still not accept the UN’s two-state solution to the problem in Palestine, preferring instead to kill over 30,000 Palestinians in pursuit of the last Hamas; if recourse to the International Criminal Court (ICC) cannot restrain Israel from the widespread carnage in Gaza; if the US, Britain and France will veto the UN’s condemnation of the attack on the Iranian Embassy in spite of the significant casualties — a crime they would not accept if it had been done to them; if the US keeps showing by its conduct that might is right… then the world is not too far from another world war.

Global institutions expected to keep the fragile balance of peace have almost all broken down, and all five veto-wielding members of the UN have gone rogue: Russia in Ukraine; China in Taiwan; and the US, Britain and France in the Middle East — and indeed anywhere else they please in pursuit of their strategic interests.

To continue to ignore the impotence of and disdain for the global institutions supposed to preserve peace and still believe that nothing would happen, is foolish and dangerous. DM