The Question of Naming

History has a way of naming things only after they have concluded. We look back at 1914 and 1939 as definitive starting points, but as we discuss in the latest Explaining History podcast, those living through the current conflagrations in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, and Venezuela are left wondering: are we already in the midst of a global conflict? And if so, at what point do we give it a name?

The historian Richard Overy, in his seminal work Blood and Ruins, suggests that the two World Wars might be viewed as a single, continuous struggle of imperial powers with a nineteen-year “quasi-peace” in between. If we adopt this broader lens, our current era of “unrelenting conflict” looks less like a series of isolated incidents and more like a violent transition from one world order to another. For those in the Global SouthGlobal South Full Description:The Global South is a term that has largely replaced “Third World” to describe the nations of Africa, Latin America, and developing Asia. It is less a geographical designator (as it includes countries in the northern hemisphere) and more a political grouping of nations that share a history of colonialism, economic marginalization, and a peripheral position in the world financial system. Bandung is often cited as the birth of the Global South as a self-aware political consciousness. Critical Perspective:While the term implies solidarity, critics argue it acts as a “flattening” concept. It lumps together economic superpowers like China and India with some of the world’s poorest nations, obscuring the vast power imbalances and divergent interests within this bloc. It risks creating a binary worldview that ignores the internal class exploitations within developing nations by focusing solely on their external exploitation by the North.
Read more, where conflict has been a near-constant reality since 1945, the Western debate over whether a “World War” has begun might seem like an academic indulgence. To much of the world, the war never truly stopped.

The American Imperium: From Production to Financialization

To understand where we are going, we must understand the “Economic Imperium” America built after 1945. Emerging from the Bretton Woods conference, the United States envisioned a world of nation-states that would serve as the building blocks for American capital. This was a world where European tariff walls were dismantled, and new nations provided cheap resources and labor for American corporate power.

However, the America of today is not the America of the 1950s. It is no longer the nation of Eisenhower’s highways, the futurist expositions of Levittown, or the industrial “arsenal of democracy.” Decades of outsourcing, financialization, and the prioritization of Wall Street over Main Street have hollowed out the American manufacturing base.

As Nick Shepley notes, this has created a paradox: while America remains a superpower, it suffers from relative decline. Like post-war Britain, which remained a top-five economy while its living standards for the working class stagnated, the U.S. is grappling with a “hollowing out” of its social and industrial fabric. This decline limits its ability to wage long, conventional wars. The philosophy that the state can manage and regulate capital—a lesson learned from the Great Depression—has been systematically dismantled by neoliberal think tanks, leaving the state ill-equipped to handle the current crisis.

The Rise of a New Challenger

While America moved away from state-managed capital, China moved toward it. In an ironic twist of history, the Chinese Communist Party has perhaps learned more from Franklin D. Roosevelt than from Chairman Mao. China has transitioned from being a “handy sweatshop” for global capital to a serious, strategic, state-led economic power.

By the Obama era, the “Pivot to Asia” signaled that the U.S. had finally recognized China not as a tool for extraction, but as a rival for hegemony. China’s version of five-year planning has not eliminated private capital but has subsumed it into national missions. This strategic containment—vying for control over the “flows” of resources—is the subtext of modern conflicts. The pressure points in Venezuela and Iran are not just about local regime change; they are about “pinching off” oil supplies to the Chinese engine.

The Proxy Wars and the Limits of Power

We are currently in a period of “aggressive great power competition.” While the presence of nuclear weapons prevents Russia, China, and the U.S. from confronting one another directly, the friction manifests at the edges of their spheres of influence.

The instability we see today echoes the Balkans in 1914. Just as the dying Ottoman Empire and the rivalries between the Habsburgs and Romanovs created a tinderbox in Eastern Europe, the relative decline of the American “unipower” hegemony has created a vacuum.

The current political landscape in the U.S. adds a layer of unpredictability. The squandering of American “soft power” and the realization that there are clear limits to American “hard power” have forced client states—such as South Korea—to reconsider the “bargains” they made for protection. If the U.S. is stripping missile defenses from faithful allies to plug holes elsewhere, the message is clear: the hegemon is overstretched.

Looking Toward a “Great Power Settlement”

What follows this era of chaos? History suggests that such periods of violence continue until a “generational great power settlement” is reached—a moment where the primary players (the U.S., China, and Russia) come to a mutual understanding of their respective spheres of influence.

However, such a settlement requires a leadership that recognizes the reality of a multipolar world. It requires an American president who appreciates the limits of economic, hard, and soft power. Britain is still on the journey of embracing its “diminished status” decades after the fall of its empire; it may take a generation or more for American culture to do the same.

We may not have a name for the current era yet. We may call it a “New Cold War,” a “Global Transition,” or eventually, “World War III.” But regardless of the label, the reality is a world of rival power blocks competing for a shrinking pool of resources. For now, we are in the “musings” phase of history—watching the wind and waiting to see which way the next storm blows.