Writing in the online journal 1945, Ted Galen Carpenter reminds us that world wars don’t start all at once. Carpenter cites reports that Russia is launching drone attacks in Poland and Germany, two NATO countries that have actively helped Ukraine launch similar attacks on Russia. He characterizes these acts of belligerency as “gray-zone warfare,” and warns that such actions are “inherently reckless” and “can easily get out of hand, leading to a cycle of escalation that culminates in full-scale warfare.” The actions on both sides, he writes, are part of a “geostrategic game of ‘chicken’” which should stop before we all go off a cliff “into an abyss.”

The abyss Carpenter warns about is an expanded war involving nuclear-armed powers. History is replete with regional wars and crises that escalate into global conflicts. In 1754, fighting between British colonists and French settlers, with their respective native-American allies, in the Ohio Valley ignited the Seven Years War that engulfed much of Europe and India until it ended in 1763. Many historians consider this the first global war. That war, as J.R. Seeley explained in The Expansion of England, was simply the latest in a series of 18th century wars between Britain and France for the control of North America. “These wars,” Seeley wrote, “group themselves very symmetrically, and the whole period stands out as an age of gigantic rivalry between England and France, a kind of second Hundred Years’ War.” The American War of Independence was also part of that larger geopolitical rivalry.