Do We Recognize a Global War When We See One?

Trump on March 19, 2026 -- public domain image

By Biljana Vankovska

A few days ago, I had the honor of participating in an international webinar organized by SHAPE—Serving Humanity and Planet Earth. As its name suggests, this project is focused on safeguarding humanity and the planet, and its acronym carries a meaningful symbolism: shaping. The theme I addressed, alongside distinguished figures such as Richard Falk, Joseph Camilleri, Chandra Muzaffar, and Helena Cobban, was Humanity on the Brink. The edge of the abyss, the total failure. Our aim was, in a sense, ‘Nietzschean’: to gaze into the abyss without allowing it to gaze back into us —without letting it pull us into its darkness.

This is an extraordinarily difficult task at a time when the United States and Israel are jointly entangled in a genocide that has now lasted two and a half years, while simultaneously engaging in aggression against Iran and Lebanon. Venezuela, too, is effectively under attack, and Cuba is subjected to what can only be described as a genocidal blockade.

The ambitions of the alleged “peace president” seem boundless; we follow and make record of his daily scandalous statements (each of them a breach of international law per se): “international law does not apply to me,” “I will bomb the Iranian island of Kharg just for fun,” “I can do whatever I want with Cuba.” The problem is that even a rational person becomes accustomed to such absurdities and begins to analyze them. But it’s hard to ignore a man who holds the power to press a “red button”. One never knows what he will say, nor what he might actually do, or how his actions will produce consequences far beyond those anticipated by him and his circle.

At the webinar, we spoke as intellectuals with conscience and genuine concern, drawing on knowledge and wisdom accumulated over decades. Yet we remained at Marx’s well-known insight: philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it. In other words, we too remained at the first part, knowing full well that we could not arrive at solutions. As the Balkan poet and singer Balašević wrote, you cannot save the world with a song; neither can a webinar or intellectual engagement do much more than awaken someone. Still, I cannot suppress a sense of anger at the betrayal of the intellectuals, or more precisely, of academia. How is it possible that they remain silent? Why do they not organize petitions, issue declarations, or express solidarity with Palestin—or now with Cuba, Venezuela or Iran? The right to dissent seems increasingly reduced to a stark choice: keep your position and security, or risk losing both. Most choose the former.

In the discussion, I raised a question that some intellectuals have recently articulated: Are we already in the third world war? Jeffrey Sachs has repeatedly warned, including the members of the UN Security Council. Emmanuel Todd agrees. Others, however, dismiss this as alarmism and insist that we must still think in terms of avoiding the abyss. Jan Oberg is among those who advocate creative thinking grounded in “peace by peaceful means,” yet even he is not immune to despair in the face of each new catastrophic decision by Donald Trump or his government in Copenhagen. My interlocutors initially dismissed the question of what constitutes a “world war” (highly contested concept). What was the “world” at that time? Was it ever equally involved in the First and Second World Wars, or is this a Western tendency to universalize its own experience?

Richard Falk inspires with his calm, even in moments of despair: he rejects both pessimism and optimism, speaking instead of possibilism of doing whatever is useful for humanity in a given moment. In a private message after the webinar, he gently reminded me that the darkest hour comes just before dawn.

Yet when I raised the question of a new world war, I had something else in mind. Even Einstein did not know what weapons would be used. Yet we see that virtually anything can become one: water, food, tariffs, energy, artificial intelligence, fertilizers, and even the human mind. Everything is weaponized. Analyses increasingly suggest that the American empire is approaching its end. But I had a similar conversation 25 years ago with Håkan Wiberg, then director of Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, who was convinced the United States would eventually collapse. My question then—still unanswered—remains: what will be the cost in human lives? How many more wars, how many more children, how many more years?

The world is already at war—not in the classical interstate sense, but in a global economic, social, class sense of the word. And more importantly, every front is open simultaneously and in an increasingly brutal way. Each Trump’s move ‘just for fun’ costs billions taken from ordinary people. The same applies to the war in Ukraine and to the EU and NATO competing in how much they will allocate for warfare. The Ouroboros is devouring itself.

The aggression against Iran and Lebanon is paid for first by their peoples, but its effects spread in widening circles. Fear that fuel will become scarce, that supply chains will collapse, that economies will suffer, that small farmers will be crushed, that sanctions and blockades will lead to internal collapse and unrest—these are no longer hypothetical scenarios. In some places, they are already a reality.

I fear that this time, a war without rules—where everything is a potential weapon—will spare no one. We may not call it a world war, but it is certainly global. As Bertrand Russell said, war does not determine who is right, but who is left. Some see in this moment the birth pains of a new order; others hope for a global awakening that will break with the current system of hyper imperialism.

Trump, metaphorically speaking, only needs a long enough rope to hang himself. Around us, more and more ‘sleeping beauties’ are awakening. Even Europeans now say, “This is not our war,” though they failed to say so in earlier conflicts (1999, 2001, 2003, 2011, etc.)—or in the face of genocide. Instead, they remained silent and profited, as Francesca Albanese proved clearly.

What is most alarming is that some leaders seem more afraid of losing face and admitting military defeat than of using nuclear weapons. Those who have no taboo against genocide—would they really hesitate before crossing the nuclear threshold? On the other hand, perhaps those who hold real power (the oligarchy) fear only the loss of profit—and will prevent total self-destruction only because the war becomes too costly.

Nightmarish times—perhaps also times of rupture and awakening. Cassandra offers no clear prophesy. Yet.

Biljana Vankovska is a professor of political science and international relations at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, an associate of the Transnational Foundation of Peace and Future Research (TFF) in Lund, Sweden, and the most influential public intellectual in Macedonia. She is a member of the No Cold War collective.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.