With good luck comes insult and complacency: the chances of another major global conflict – and, at worst, a new world war – are much higher than we imagine and continue to rise. No one knows the exact possibility, but even a 10 percent chance of a global catastrophe this century would be frightening and would have to justify an urgent, renewed focus on every western country to ensure that Armageddon can be avoided through strong prevention, new alliances. huge investments in defense weapons and urgent diplomatic engagement. Why such pessimism? It’s partly a numbers game. The proliferation of advanced technologies, including the stupid blunder that has been the proliferation of nuclear weapons, suggests that more countries have the potential to do enormous damage. and geopolitics becomes increasingly complex with the end of American hegemony, increasing the likelihood of a fatal misunderstanding or that a local conflict in Africa, Latin America, or Asia is spiraling out of control. Why can’t the Biden government see that allowing Iran to go nuclear would almost guarantee at least one regional war? The Cold War was a simple conflict, and yet we survived it only by chance. The Kennedys did not save the world during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The real hero was Vasili Arkhipov, the second captain of a Russian submarine, who, in October 1962, disobeyed his commander’s order, confused by his lack of contact with Moscow, to launch a nuclear torpedo into America. In 1983, Stanislav Petrov, another Russian officer, ignored an early warning system indicating that the United States had just launched a nuclear attack on the USSR. There have been other such failures, including when the Russians confused Able Archer, a NATO exercise, with a genuine plot, as dramatized on Deutschland 83. In today’s much more complex world, and with paranoid dictatorships like the North to be able to carry out a huge massacre, it will be even easier for countries to get involved in a total war. The fact that Russia has such a low performance on the Ukrainian battlefield is good news, but it should not lullaby us into a false sense of security. With the exception of Germany, the West has performed well, supporting Ukraine in a dynamic but prudent way, but other nations such as India, Pakistan and China have thwarted these efforts. Many emerging powers would like to retain the option of invading one of their neighbors – Taiwan is the obvious flashpoint – and are no longer willing to defer to the West. Consensus after 1945 has waned, as have most of the institutions that have allowed rival states to semi-manage their differences, especially in the impoverished UN. Imperialism is back, as is the state of civilization. India and Pakistan are armed to the teeth and in many contrasts. The world is becoming more, than less, dangerous: there are many other Putin’s incompetents and they are better equipped to sow death and destruction. Bioterrorism is a growing concern: why are “functionality” studies still tolerated? A major cyber attack or transatlantic cable attack could be so devastating to an Internet-based economy that it is considered a declaration of war. During the Cold War, the United States believed that it had successfully prevented Soviet use of nuclear weapons thanks to the doctrine of mutual destruction, but historians who have read declassified Moscow documents realize that this was delusional. The USSR planned to use nuclear tactics early on in any conflict with NATO. Does this thought persist in Moscow today or in any other nuclear power? How would we react to a “random” conventional bombing of a target in Poland? Or the regular use of nuclear weapons by Russia in Ukraine? Our pseudo-rational West continues to misunderstand how despotic leaders value what is in their best interests, why high-stakes bets can make sense to them, and how the West itself is misinterpreted by others. We are very much influenced by low-level game theory and continue to dismiss the possibility of another world war as “unthinkable”. The classic example, as Keith Payne recounts in the foundation of The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and a New Direction, is when Dean Acheson told Roosevelt in August 1941, four months before Pearl Harbor, that “no sensible Japanese he could believe an attack on him could end up with anything but disaster for his country. ” Acheson was right that it would end terribly for Tokyo, but he calculated fatally, not realizing that the Japanese establishment had convinced itself that it was in fact “doomed” if it did not attack. He believed he had no choice – Putin, the head of a vicious, declining gangster state, may have had similar thoughts. Despite all our modern communications, human beings have not yet learned to understand each other. We remain unable to get into the heads of our enemies, to truly understand their thinking, their fears (however wrong they may be), their assumptions and values ​​(however repulsive they may be). We are very abstract, insufficiently focused on personalities and very morally arrogant, assuming that Russia or China perfectly understand our policy, our knowledge, our values ​​and our reactionary functions. We do not understand reasonings or impulses that are outside our box, our moral system. Therefore, we continue to fail to predict how fraudsters will behave. We do not understand their perceptions. The problem, Payne argues, is that we confuse rationality with logic or what we think is rational. A fundamental disconnect looks us in the eye: science and technology continue to improve, making war increasingly dangerous, destructive and easy, but the Western state has atrophied, along with our political institutions, our understanding of history. our diplomacy and ability to think clearly about danger. Unless Britain, America and others dramatically upgrade their game, the prospects for world peace look bleak.