World War Three Isn't Coming — The Armed Peace Never Ended

Every day on the internet a fashionable madman (they are mostly men) predicts, with a boring pedantic cry, that “World War Three” has begun or will do, any day now. The history of empires and realist game theory proves it. Click, like and subscribe.

But World War Three never comes. The small, regional or ‘proxy’ war, the Cold War 2.0, or the ‘frozen conflict’ never quite breaks out into total, global war. Count your blessings while you may. But also realise there is something wrong with the story here. Indeed, there are two misconceptions. One is about history. The other is mythology.

The principal error is the wrong history. Pundits make the wrong historical comparison. The global conflicts today do not resemble two brief periods of total war in the twentieth century, which, by convention since 1945, we designate as World War One and Two. They resemble an earlier period of worldwide imperial violence from 1500 to 1914, which became a “sprawling regime of armed peace.”

That regime was established by Greater Europe (Russia, Europe, North America) from the eighteenth century. Historian Lauren Benton argues in They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (2024), those powers “asserted the right to set the laws of war and intervene anywhere to protect imperial subjects and interests.”1

Benton, They Called It Peace overturns many conventional ideas about imperial wars, empire, resistance to empire, violence and world order. She highlights the connections between the pre-1914 worlds of imperial violence and today’s ruptured post-1945 world that fears World War Three. In both worlds, imperial states operated in the gray zone. They both, as in Orwell’s 1984, called their wars ‘peace’.

In the pre-1914 regime of armed peace, the Greater European Empires “specialized in violence at the threshold of war and peace.” Sound familiar?

Our world is more dangerous and contested now than it has been for decades. Conflict is evolving and trust eroding, just as new technologies spur both competition and dependence. We are being contested from sea to space, from the battlefield to the boardroom. And even our brains, as disinformation manipulates our understanding of each other and ourselves. . . . We are now operating in a space between peace and war.

Speech by Blaise Metreweli, Chief of SIS (British spy agency), 15 December 2025