Lately, I’ve had the uneasy feeling that the world’s conflicts are no longer separate stories.
When I read the news, what once felt like isolated crises now feels connected: war in one place, energy struggles in another, trade tensions somewhere else, and political instability never far away. The names and locations change, but the pattern feels familiar. And the more I sit with it, the more I find myself asking a question that would have sounded exaggerated to me not so long ago:
Are we already living through a kind of world war?
I do not mean a world war in the old-fashioned sense, with one clear beginning, obvious sides, and everyone drawn into the same fight at once. 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 less far-fetched that sounds.
What History Keeps Showing Us
One of the things I keep coming back to is how often we talk about colonialism as though it began with Europe in the seventeenth century. European colonialism reshaped the modern world in enormous ways, of course, but empires were conquering and controlling other societies long before that.
We see it in ancient empires. We see it in Egypt, in Alexander’s conquests, in Rome, in the political expansion of Islam, in the Mongols, and later in the rise of European powers such as Spain, Holland, France, and England, whose influence reached into the Americas, India, China, and beyond.
The basic pattern stays much the same. What changes are the scale, the tools, and the language used to justify it.
And for all the talk of glory, mission, civilization, or destiny, so much of it still comes down to money.
That may sound cynical, but history gives us plenty of reason to think that way.
What the Opium Wars Reveal
For the past several years, I’ve been taking part in the daily lectures of Lockdown University, and recently the historian Tzvi Ben-Dor Benite gave a series on the Opium Wars.¹ I have not been able to stop thinking about them. They felt more modern than I expected.
In the years before the Opium Wars, Britain had a problem: it wanted Chinese goods such as tea, silk, porcelain, and other luxury items that were in great demand among European elites, but China had very little interest in buying British goods in return.
So Britain looked for another way in.
It found one in opium.
What stands out to me is how calculated it all was. The British knew opium was already used in China in small medicinal doses, and they took advantage of that. They grew it in India and sold it in China because they needed something the Chinese would buy. China did buy it, and the consequences were devastating.
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 a weapon.
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.
The Chinese state was not simply overpowered externally. It was already weakening internally. Corruption was rampant. Rebellions were breaking out. From a distance, the state looked strong. In reality, it was far weaker than it seemed.
That part also feels painfully current.
History shows again and again that outside pressure works best when a country is already divided, exhausted, or unstable. When a country is already fragile on the inside, external pressure hits even harder.
After the Opium Wars, China entered what later became known as the “century of humiliation.” A number of China’s coastal port cities came under foreign control. Europeans lived under their own laws. China lost control over tariffs and over key parts of its economy. Hong Kong went to Britain. Taiwan later fell under Japanese rule. Little by little, China was losing control over its own country.
It was not just a military defeat. This meant that China was no longer fully in charge of its own affairs.
And that is what makes this history feel like more than a history lesson. It feels like a warning.
Why This Feels So Relevant Now
When I look at the world now, I see a different commodity at the center of it all, but a very familiar kind of struggle.
Today, that commodity is energy.
Oil, gas, coal, electricity, shipping routes, pipelines, and critical minerals are not side issues. They shape power, create dependency, and help explain why countries act the way they do.
Once I started looking at things this way, a great deal began to make more sense to me. The tensions involving the United States, China, Russia, and the Middle East no longer seemed like separate problems. They seemed connected.
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
I sometimes think 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 this is what world war looks like now? Not one clearly defined conflict, but a mix of sanctions, proxy wars, cyberattacks, trade pressure, and energy struggles. Not every country fighting on a battlefield, but nearly every country feeling the effects.
That feels closer to the truth of the world we live in.
And I think that is what has been bothering me. It is not only the scale of today’s tensions. It is the sense that we may still be using old language for a very different kind of reality.
The Thought I Keep Coming Back To
I am not saying that history repeats itself exactly. It never does. But I do think history gives us patterns, and those patterns 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.
I do not see why we should pretend it is not true now.
So when I look at the world today, I see fights over energy, wars whose effects reach far beyond one region, powerful countries challenging one another, and weaker ones paying the price. And I keep coming back to the same thought:
Maybe we are already living through a world war.
Not the kind our grandparents knew.
Not one with a clean beginning or a universally agreed-upon name.
But a global struggle all the same.
And perhaps the most dangerous part is that we may fail to recognize it precisely because it does not look the way we expect a world war to look.
- 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