Are today’s global conflicts merging into a single, interconnected crisis?
Once-isolated crises, including war, energy, trade, and political instability, now feel interconnected. The names and locations change, but the pattern is familiar. This leads me to ask a question that once sounded exaggerated:
Are we seeing a new kind of world war, one defined by interconnected global struggles rather than by battlefields?
Not a world war in the old-fashioned sense, with one clear beginning, obvious sides, and everyone drawn into the same fight. I mean something more scattered than that, but still deeply serious: a global struggle over trade, resources, territory, power, and survival.
The more history I read, the more justified that fear becomes.
The Issue of “Colonialism” is All-Consuming
Colonialism is frequently discussed within academia and is often deemed the primary moral fault of our era, a view that assigns blame to Western democracies as colonialist powers and virtue to developing countries as their victims, as though colonialism began in Europe in the seventeenth century. European colonialism significantly reshaped the modern world, but empires had conquered and controlled others long before that.
Empires throughout history, including Egypt, Alexander, Rome, Islamic expansion, the Mongols, and later European powers like Spain, Holland, France, and England, have repeatedly conquered and controlled vast regions.
The basic patterns remain: methods and scale shift, but conquest and power dynamics persist.
Yet for all the rhetoric, so much ultimately comes down to money.
That may sound cynical, but history gives us plenty of reason to be cynical.
What the Opium Wars Reveal
Recently, historian Zvi Ben-Dor Benite presented a compelling series of talks on the Opium Wars at Lockdown University, in which I participated. The content has stayed with me; the parallels between those wars and current global tensions are striking.
Before the Opium Wars began, Britain faced a problem: it wanted Chinese goods such as tea, silk, porcelain, and luxury items that were in great demand among European elites, but China showed little interest in buying British goods in return.
So Britain looked for another way in.
It found one in opium.
What stands out is the calculated nature of Britain’s strategy. The British recognized that opium was already used medicinally in China and deliberately expanded its import. They produced it in India and sold it in China because it was a product the Chinese would buy. The resulting consequences for China were severe.
Addiction spread. China lost huge amounts of silver. Society weakened. And when the Chinese government finally tried to stop the trade, Britain went to war.
To me, that is one of the clearest examples of trade becoming weaponized.
How a Commodity Can Break a Country
What makes the Opium Wars so disturbing is that they were not just about one country forcing open another country’s markets. They showed how a commodity could weaken a society from within when the internal conditions were already in place.
When Britain struck, China had already been struggling from within. Corruption was rampant. Rebellions were breaking out. From the outside, the state looked strong. However, it was much weaker than it seemed.
That similarity feels disturbingly current.
History shows that outside pressure is most effective against countries that are already divided or unstable. Internal fragility makes external pressure even more damaging.
After the Opium Wars, China entered what later became known as the “century of humiliation.” Several of China’s coastal port cities came under foreign control. Europeans lived under their own laws. China lost control over tariffs and key parts of its economy. Hong Kong went to Britain. Taiwan later fell under Japanese rule. Little by little, China was losing control of its own country.
China suffered not just a military defeat but, equally significant, the loss of full control over its own affairs.
This history is more than a lesson; it warns us how economic and societal vulnerabilities can become battlegrounds in global conflict.
Why This Feels So Relevant Now
Today, I see a different commodity at the center of it all, but a very familiar kind of struggle.
That commodity is energy.
Oil, gas, coal, electricity, shipping routes, pipelines, and critical minerals determine power, create dependency, and help explain how countries act.
Seen in this light, tensions among the United States, China, Russia, and the Middle East clearly connect rather than appear as separate problems.
Questions to consider include:
Who controls supply?
Who controls transport?
Who can survive disruption?
Who can pressure others economically without firing a shot?
Who can turn dependence into power?
These are not abstract questions. They are some of the biggest questions shaping the world right now.
Maybe We Still Picture War the Old Way
Perhaps one reason we hesitate to use the term “world war” is that we are still picturing the twentieth century. We think of trench lines, invading armies, uniforms, and maps with arrows moving across continents.
But maybe war no longer looks like that.
What if world war now means sanctions, proxy wars, cyberattacks, and economic struggles?
That feels closer to the truth of the world we are living in.
What unsettles me most is the possibility that our language and our thinking lag behind a new kind of global conflict already unfolding.
The Thought I Keep Coming Back To
I am not saying history repeats itself exactly; it never does. But history provides patterns, and those matter.
What the Opium Wars show is that war does not always begin with armies. Sometimes it begins with trade, pressure, and dependence. A commodity can be used to weaken a country from within. By the time military force arrives, the damage may already be well underway.
That was true then.
We cannot afford to pretend it is not true now.
Today’s global struggles, with energy at the center, cross borders and reshape our world. The more I observe, the more unmistakable the pattern seems.
Not the kind our grandparents knew.
Not one with a clear beginning or a universally agreed-upon name.
But a global struggle all the same.
The real danger may be our failure to recognize this kind of world war simply because it no longer fits our old expectations.
- Tzvi Ben-Dor Benite, “China: The Road to Opium War,” Lockdown University, lecture 3028, www.lockdownuniversity.org/lectures/3028-china-the-road-to-opium-war