By Junaid S. Ahmad
The great lie of our time is that World War III is a looming possibility. Politicians whisper it with grave brows, think-tankers roll it out on PowerPoint slides, and journalists rehearse their “serious voice” to warn we teeter on the brink. But let’s drop the theatre. The war is not looming. It’s already here.
It just doesn’t look like the history books promised. There’s no Archduke Ferdinand, no Pearl Harbor, no mushroom cloud. Instead, it is a rolling series of wars, upheavals, and genocides: Gaza, Ukraine, the South China Sea, the Sahel. A world war by subscription plan, billed monthly in blood.
Call it Cold War 2.0 if you like. It’s catchy, conjuring images of icy standoffs and tense chess matches. But there’s nothing cold about it. If the first Cold War was ‘Dr. Strangelove’, this one is ‘Dumb and Dumber’—with nukes.
Nostalgia for a simpler empire
Washington’s foreign-policy elite are hooked on Cold War nostalgia. They scribble about “containment” and “credibility” as though the Soviet Union never collapsed, imagining themselves heirs to Kennan and Kissinger. But where the old Cold War still had rules—hotlines, treaties, basic recognition of limits—today’s version has only hashtags and lectures.
Diplomacy is not struggling. It is dead. If the Cuban Missile Crisis happened under former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, he would have issued a TikTok video, strummed a guitar riff, and called it a day.
The decline of the strategic brain
At least the Cold War’s architects, however monstrous, understood statecraft. Kissinger’s opening to China split Beijing from Moscow and gave Washington decades of advantage.
Today’s “strategists” have accomplished the opposite. Instead of dividing Russia and China, they officiated their marriage. Moscow and Beijing are closer now than at any point in modern history—a nightmare scenario that Cold War veterans bent over backwards to avoid. Washington thought it was playing divide-and-conquer; it played unite-and-empower.
The entire foreign-policy class is riddled with mediocrities. They mistake shouting about a “rules-based order” for actual rules. But the world no longer believes Washington writes them. If the first Cold War was chess, Cold War 2.0 is tic-tac-toe played by toddlers who think they’re Napoleon.
The Global South’s new mood
Meanwhile, outside Washington’s echo chamber, the world is moving on. As the analyst Vijay Prashad notes, there is a fresh anti-imperialist mood in the Global South—a planetary exhaustion with empire. From Latin America to Africa to Asia, states and peoples are refusing to play Washington’s game.
This mood was on full display at last week’s UN General Assembly. Colombia—not an Arab state, not even one geographically close to Gaza—was the first to call for an international protection force to stop the genocide. That one act embarrassed Arab governments, who had spent almost two years feigning impotence while Palestinians bled, into finally staging their theatrical outrage.
And when Benjamin Netanyahu took the stage, the pariah status of Israel was laid bare: most delegations walked out, leaving him to deliver his bile to an almost empty hall. The “most moral army in the world” now presides over the most immoral spectacle of our time, and the world increasingly knows it.
The Gaza genocide is not a side note in this disorder. It is the moral issue of our lifetimes—an annihilation project bankrolled by Washington, armed by its weapons manufacturers, and shielded by its vetoes. Gaza has become the wound that exposes empire’s savagery for all to see.
States are not the only players
The most important actors may not be states at all. Global solidarity movements, liberation struggles, and anti-war coalitions are increasingly shaping the conversation. They march in New York, London, Johannesburg, São Paulo. They demand an egalitarian and just order in defiance of oligarchs who convene at summits to divide spoils. Empire is not only opposed by rival states but by the people of the world themselves.
The rotten deals of oligarchs
Nowhere is the hollowness of empire clearer than in the “defense pacts” that keep arms dealers fat while populations starve. Take the Saudi-Pakistan pact, a Cold War zombie revived in the present. Both regimes claim they need it to ward off hypothetical assaults. Yet in both countries, vast swathes of the population suffer impoverishment and exploitation. Wouldn’t a socio-economic pact—one aimed at reducing inequality, building infrastructure, ensuring health and education—serve them far better?
But such pacts never appear on the agenda of rulers who only meet to swap arms and secure palaces. This is the essence of the imperial order: oligarchs colluding with oligarchs while the masses are offered nothing but sermons. Washington is the grand convener of this oligarchic jamboree.
Ordinary Americans, extraordinary exploitation
Empire is no bargain for ordinary Americans either. Their airports crumble, their healthcare bankrupts, their wages stagnate. Yet their ruling elite, in partnership with allied surrogate rulers abroad, deepen cruelties elsewhere while demanding loyalty at home. The same hands that sign billion-dollar checks for bombs deny baby formula, food stamps, and housing. America’s rulers wage war abroad and austerity at home, exporting misery while importing despair.
Why this war burns hotter
The old Cold War was brutal but bounded. Proxy wars raged in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan—but direct clashes were avoided. Containment was the name of the game.
This time, the gloves are off. NATO isn’t just arming Ukraine; it’s training troops, supplying intelligence, running logistics—everything but wearing the uniform. Washington bankrolls and shields Israel as it unleashes devastation that much of the world now openly calls genocidal. Europe, once capable of pretending independence, now functions as Washington’s well-dressed intern, sanctioning whomever the boss commands even at the cost of its own industries.
The South China Sea is a tinderbox, with US warships loitering like tourists who can’t read “Do Not Enter” signs. And the Sahel is shaking off its colonial hangover, with coups and realignments in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Western commentators sneer about “instability.” What they mean is that African nations are rejecting French and American meddling. It’s called independence.
This isn’t containment. It’s escalation. And it isn’t cold. It’s hot. Very hot.
The empire of folly
Here lies the core danger: not just that the US is belligerent, but that it is belligerently brainless. Cruelty empires can survive; history proves that. What they cannot survive is lunacy.
Every sanction, every lecture, every tirade has driven Russia and China closer together—precisely what generations of strategists warned against. Washington congratulates itself on a “values-based foreign policy” while uniting adversaries, alienating allies, and squandering legitimacy. This isn’t strategy. It’s the geopolitical equivalent of locking yourself out of your house, setting it on fire while trying to break back in, then blaming the neighbors for the smoke.
The last temper tantrum
The fresh anti-imperialist mood in the Global South, the walkouts at the UN, the solidarity of people across continents—these are not irritations to empire. They are signs of its terminal crisis. A once-mighty order that dictated to the world is now reduced to begging allies, bribing clients, and silencing dissent with hashtags. It is the empire’s last temper tantrum—loud, violent, and absurd.
And if the end comes, it won’t be remembered as the triumph of democracy or the clash of civilizations. It will be remembered as the moment a once-mighty empire dragged the world into fire, not out of necessity or ideology, but out of sheer, world-historic imbecility. A world war born not of vision, but of vanity. Not of strategy, but of senseless idiocy.
The Global South, the solidarity movements, the millions who refuse the empire’s narrative—they are not simply resisting war. They are building the possibility of something else, something saner. Whether that possibility triumphs is the open question of our time.
What is certain is this: World War III is not tomorrow’s nightmare. It is today’s reality. And it may yet end not with a bang, but with the empire tripping over its shoelaces one final time, dragging us all down in its fall—unless the rest of the world learns to let go of its hand.
Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org/), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com/), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE – https://www.theshapeproject.com/).
28 September 2025