“World War” is an imaginary term.

There has never been a literal “world war.”  Many countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Portugal, Vatican City, and Tibet did not participate in World War II.  They are part of the world, yet they never went to war.

The Allies also did not win either world war by taking over the entire world or by fighting in every country, or even in every European or East Asian country.  It was enough to overthrow the Mussolini regime, and to force both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan into unconditional surrender.

A “third world war” very nearly began in the Korean Peninsula in the 1950s.  It was the war Douglas MacArthur wanted in his eternal quest for glory, and was prevented by a chain of events that can only be called miraculous.  First, President Truman fired MacArthur.  Then Matthew Ridgway returned American forces just past the 38th Parallel in 100 days and stopped.  Then shortly after President Eisenhower took office, Josef Stalin died. The Korean War ended in armistice.  Now that conflict, and the 3 million killed, remain largely forgotten, despite what it could have been and almost was.

The reason we called the 20th century’s two biggest wars “world wars” is only because the second one expanded the scale of conflict between nations and great powers on a level that had never been seen before in history.  It is a term in hindsight.  The closest thing to it was the Seven Years War (better known on this side of the globe as the French & Indian War), where two great powers and their allies vied for control of multiple continents from 1756-63, where a million people were killed, and where Russia switched sides before the end (what else is new?).  But by the 20^th century, no one alive remembered that (except Churchill, sort of, as he famously labeled that conflict “the first world war”).

In other words, we have seen at least three “world wars” already, and then a peninsular conflict that nearly kicked off a fourth.  But none of them were world wars.  They were continental wars and intercontinental wars, wars with multiple theaters and rival coalitions.  We call them world wars because that is how our imagination can make sense of their scale.

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What then would a “world war” look like today?  The answer is that it would look like the last one, but only if you looked at it from the perspective of what it must have been like to witness it unfolding before your eyes without knowing what came later.

World War II was a very specific conflict that required an ideological alliance of militant belligerents against much of the rest of the world.  Three major powers, one of which was an entire continent and a half away from the other two, allied with each other against the rest of the world and in particular the West and the winners of World War I, as well as to take advantage of the economic depression and political turmoil of the 1930s.  And because they were not deterred, they waged war after war, after war until two of them – Germany and Italy – betrayed and invaded their geopolitical and trading partner, the Soviet Union; and the other – Japan – attacked America.

But if you woke up on September 2, 1939, you would not necessarily think that it was a world war.  And if you did, you would be ignored because the war in Poland lasted barely over a month.  Germany’s war in Denmark and Norway lasted two months.  Then Germany’s war to the west against France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland was won in six weeks.  Italy conquered both Yugoslavia and Greece in just over 200 days.  Despite a great fight put up by the Finnish, the Soviets chewed out enough of Finland to call their 100-day winter war a victory.  And the Japanese were well established in China, hacking babies to death and surgically removing the organs of wide awake people while they screamed, and with no one to stop them.

Or, you could go back roughly three decades earlier.  “The Great War” began because of a regional political dispute between the Kingdom of Serbia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Both of them were protectorates and/or proxies of greater powers – Germany for Austria-Hungary and Russia for Serbia.  That Balkan dispute drew those great arms-racing powers and their allies into war like a force of planetary gravity after each of their respective ultimatums to the other expired.

“World War III” has already begun.  But we are not ready to call it that yet.  We still call these present-day conflicts “the war in Ukraine” and “the Israel-Hamas War,” conveniently forgetting that Hamas is a protectorate of Iran, which has now launched its first direct attack against Israel.  Iran is allied with Russia, and both of them are allied with China and North Korea.  There’s your alliance of major powers, or, rather, your new “Axis.”  Or perhaps you can call it an “Axis Bloc,” or the “Black Sea and Yalu River Axes.”  Either way, the present conflicts throughout the world right now, all of which are also proxy wars, with the United States pretending not to intervene by exercising control of Ukraine and Israel, are the seeds of what will eventually become a larger global conflict in your imagination.  You will call that conflict “World War III.”  And when you do, you will retroactively look back on the date of February 24, 2022 as the date it all started, October 7, 2023 as the next date which will live in infamy, and probably another date soon to come when China finally attacks Taiwan.  It will all look pretty similar in hindsight to September 1, 1939, June 22, 1941, and December 7, 1941.

And just like the last “world war,” we may not see an end to this one until there arrives a future date that looks a lot like August 6, 1945.

– Vivek