As a new semester begins, the world stands on the precipice of global conflict. 

In Eastern Europe, the largest European war since World War II rages between a nuclear-armed Russia and a Ukrainian republic struggling to survive. With the United States and its European and Asian allies sending Ukraine tanks, jets, and other weapons and Iran and North Korea supplying Russia with munitions, drones, and ballistic missiles, the Russo-Ukrainian conflict functions as a proxy war between a bloc of Eurasian autocracies led by China, Russia, and Iran and a bloc of Western democracies led by the United States. To the south, the most intense war in the Levant since the 1973 Yom Kippur War continues, and has escalated even further during the last week. Triggered by the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, the Israeli-Iranian war can also be viewed as a proxy war between the Western and Eurasian blocs due to American support for Israel and Russia’s bolstering of Iran. Meanwhile, in the East, the prospect of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan looms over the Indo-Pacific. 

To those who came of age during the decades after the Cold War’s peaceful end, the current global situation may seem troubling, disorienting, and even terrifying. The post-Cold War world, while by no means lacking in military conflicts, was generally at peace. These decades witnessed the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; multiple rounds of conflict between Israel and Hamas; the implosion of Yugoslavia; the catastrophe in Syria; Russian forays into Georgia, Crimea, and eastern Ukraine; and other smaller conflicts. But, it can be argued that during the decades of the post-Cold War era, the world did not experience the type of large-scale, state-on-state wars currently playing out in both Europe and the Middle East. Each world region and the international order as a whole avoided systemic breakdown. Even the Middle East, troubled by more conflicts than any other region during the post-Cold War decades, retained its basic geopolitical architecture, split between an American-led grouping of Israel and moderate Sunni states and an Iranian-led revisionist axis.

This post-Cold War era, however, is a historical anomaly. Regional wars and systemic breakdown are the norm throughout modern history. During the nineteenth century, the European powers fought numerous regional conflicts, including the Crimean War, Franco-Austrian War, Austro-Prussian War, and Franco-Prussian War. Such regional conflicts went global during the twentieth century, and included the Russo-Japanese War, Korean War, and Six-Day War.

In between these many regional conflicts were the systemic conflicts: the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, World War I, and World War II. In all three of these gargantuan contests, the entire European order collapsed. The Europe that emerged from the embers of each conflict differed starkly from that which existed prior to it. Moreover, with respect to the world wars, the first destroyed the Ottoman-centered Middle Eastern order, while the second obliterated the Japanese-dominated East Asian order.  

In such scenarios, history moved fast. Napoleon shattered Austria’s dominant position in Central Europe and pulled the region into France’s sphere of influence in a matter of months in 1805. Britain’s professional army was decimated in a similar time frame during the opening stages of World War I. France fell in a mere six weeks in 1940. 

During the last three decades, the recrudescence of such chaos and bloodshed might have seemed inconceivable. But the regional wars of the 2020s serve as a reminder that the even more extreme type of war—the systemic conflict—could also return. Matters can again escalate very quickly and  the path history may take is not inevitable. While structural conditions may limit the possible paths history can take, individuals determine which of those paths history will barrel down. Had Vladimir Putin’s Blitzkrieg succeeded in installing a pro-Russian client regime in Kyiv, a victorious Russia whose power now extended into Mitteleuropa may have been emboldened to challenge NATO. Had Israel not succeeded in resisting Iran’s April attack, the conflict in the Levant may have escalated into a full-fledged regional conflagration.  

The relative peace of the post-Cold War era is over. Recognizing that reality is the first step to checking the slide into global conflict and stabilizing the battered but not yet shattered international system.