How Anti-War Movements Could Reshape Today's Escalating Global Conflicts
The West Faces Global Competition—Opening Opportunities for Developing Nations but Raising the Risk of War. Is There an Alternative?
The world most people alive today grew up in was either bipolar—divided into two blocs—or unipolar, dominated by a single superpower, the United States, backed by its European NATO allies.
"We are the only superpower in the world. That means we must lead it." With these words in 1993, Bill Clinton encapsulated what would be taken for granted for the next three decades. After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, only one global center of power seemed to remain. That certainty is now crumbling.
Today, U.S. hegemony is eroding—at least in parts of the world—as the People's Republic of China challenges America in financial markets, robotics, renewable energy, and through new trade routes for trucks and railways.
"There is a shift from a unipolar to a multipolar world," South African President Cyril Ramaphosa summarized this development last year at a BRICS summit.
Ramaphosa leads South Africa, the "S" in the BRICS acronym, which also includes Brazil, Russia, India, and China—the latter being the bloc's strongest member. Together, they seek to break Western, and above all U.S., dominance over financial flows, trade routes, and markets.
Hope in Multipolarity
While Berlin, London, and Washington view the decline of the U.S.-led order with concern, the Global South sees it differently: as an opportunity. The waning influence of the United States is creating new room for maneuver.
China's competition with the West—from the port of Piraeus to road projects in Montenegro and infrastructure investments across Africa—is reshaping global power dynamics. Unlike Washington, Paris, or Berlin, Beijing rarely ties its investments to explicit political conditions. For many countries, this means one thing: more choices, less dependence.
But there's a catch. Global competition for markets and influence follows a ruthless logic: not everyone can win at the same time. There may be phases where multiple players are neck and neck—but in the end, competition demands losers.
In sports, that's painful. In geopolitics, it can be deadly.
The fact that the U.S. now faces serious rivals—even if they remain militarily far weaker—does not make the world more peaceful but more violent. The crises and wars in Sudan, West Africa, Ukraine, and the Middle East are not just the result of local tensions but also reflect the power struggle between old and new great powers and regional players.
In Syria, militias backed by mercenaries funded by Ankara, Washington, Tehran, and Moscow have been fighting for 15 years. In Yemen, Iran and Saudi Arabia wage a proxy war that is, at least indirectly, also a conflict between a pro-Western axis and Russia. The list goes on.
Historical Parallels
While some today draw comparisons to 1933, invoking Trump, Putin, and the far right, the world today more closely resembles the early 1910s. Back then, as now, multiple power centers vied for dominance. At the start of the last century, a handful of great powers competed for supremacy in Europe and across the continents it had colonized.
Britain, France, the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Russia not only dominated Eurasia but also built railways, ports, and plantations across what anti-colonial fighters would later call the Third World. This order was stable for a time—but its stability was built on the bones of millions.
The EU as a War Union
Europe's Powers—Led by Germany—Drive Military Escalation Forward
Under the guise of defense, the signs are clear: an EU army, military spending as the largest item in Germany's federal budget, and arms deliveries—all packaged with the necessary moral vocabulary. Ideological euphemisms like "forward defense" (as coined by Der Spiegel) have already been tested in the context of the West's moral and military support for the genocide in Gaza.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, EU countries are attempting to fill the void left by Trump's strategic pivot toward East Asia. While they may be too divided for a full-scale proxy war, they are more than capable of prolonging the conflict to weaken their Russian rival.
Yet even in this part of the West, signs of erosion are evident. In 1980, the European Economic Community (EEC), the precursor to the EU, still accounted for roughly 28 percent of global GDP, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). By 2023, the IMF estimated the EU's share—despite its expanded membership—had shrunk to just under 15 percent.
This decline stems from two factors: the shrinking proportion of EU citizens in the global population and the growing competition from Asia, which is increasingly challenging the capital of Europe's core economies.
For decades, China's rise was a boon for Germany and other EU nations, offering cheaper production and higher profits. But the dynamic has shifted. China is now outpacing Europe, its state-guided capitalism and greater investment appetite long since surpassing the old continent in key technologies—electric mobility, for instance. Meanwhile, the EU faces internal fractures, with some member states no longer willing to align with Brussels, Berlin, or Paris. The UK has already left, and countries like Hungary are breaking ranks.
No False Illusions
When economic and geopolitical dominance is under threat, danger follows. This holds true for the United States, where the slogan "Make America Great Again" itself signals a loss of power—one that is now being compensated for with increasing aggression. The same applies to the EU's core nations, which, confronted with Europe's waning global influence, are doubling down on militarization.
The massive arms buildup in the EU is justified by claims that NATO members face a Russian threat. This notion is absurd: Putin has been waging war in Ukraine for over four years, yet despite mass mobilization and more than 320,000 Russian soldiers killed, his gains remain minimal. An attack on NATO's militarily superior European members would be utterly futile. The real purpose of this buildup, then, is likely to enable more offensive operations in the future.
As the flames of spreading conflicts flicker across the globe, the multipolar world appears unsettling. This is not to say we should mourn the old, Western-dominated order—quite the opposite.
The enforcement of Western interests over recent decades has cost tens of millions of lives worldwide, not only through wars and massacres—from Vietnam to Afghanistan, Iraq, and South America—but also through brutal economic policies, such as withholding patents for life-saving medicines and agricultural seeds.
The Lesson of 1912
But is there a third path beyond the false dichotomy of Western and Eastern militarism? To answer this, let us turn back the clock one last time. Basel, a cold Sunday in November 1912: Hundreds of red flags flutter in the streets as more than 550 delegates from 23 countries arrive in the Swiss city.
Among them were delegates from countries whose governments were locked in dispute: Germany, France, and Russia. In a peace manifesto, they declared that workers' organizations across all nations must use "every effective means" to prevent an imperialist war—and, should war break out, turn it into a mobilization and revolution against their own ruling classes.
Socialists like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht had already spoken out publicly in the German Reichstag in the years prior, railing against arms shipments and war loans. When World War I erupted just two years later, they kept their word—unlike the majority of the SPD and other European workers' parties. Only in Russia did the Bolsheviks form a major anti-war faction within the Social Democratic movement, continuing to agitate against the conflict, exploiting the chaos of war to topple the tsar, and ultimately bringing Russia's involvement to an end.
While historians rightly avoid counterfactuals, we'll pose the question anyway: What if European social democracy had held firm in its rejection of war in 1914? What if the SPD and the trade unions—mass organizations with millions of members—had struck against war credits and military mobilization?
Today, over a century later, Europe is once again seeing protests against militarization and war. Last autumn, an estimated two million people in Italy went on strike against arms shipments to Israel and the austerity measures tied to the country's military buildup, according to Italian trade unions.
For days, the nation ground to a halt, and since then, dockworkers in Genoa and elsewhere have increasingly blocked cargo ships carrying military supplies. In other words: There is a third option, beyond NATO and Putin. Wars end when people refuse to fight them.
