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There’s a lot of talk about WW3, but what if we’ve been looking at this the wrong way around. 🧵 …

We divide history into two world wars as if peaceful coexistence is the natural state of affairs in our world the rest of the time. In reality, humanity has had to endure centuries of warring empires.

The First World War was arguably the culmination of the age of empires. The Second World War was an attempt to drag us back to that age of empires, after Hitler and Stalin agreed their pact to divide Europe into spheres of influence.

Colonial history and world war history are usually separate chapters in our history books, or separate books entirely. But world wars are imperial wars too. Understanding that is crucial to building the global consensus to properly defend a rules-based order that serves all sovereign nations.

History wasn’t just interrupted by two World Wars. It was also interrupted by two attempts at World Peace, the ambitious efforts to build a rules-based world of sovereign nations as an alternative to centuries of imperial conquest.

Both needed an ambitious restart and then continuous improvement. Both helped deliver unprecedented levels of peace and prosperity. And both of them began being built DURING world wars. They did not spring spontaneously from the ruins afterwards.

Detailed planning for the League of Nations started within weeks of the First World War’s outbreak. The plan for a United Nations began in the very darkest hours of the Second World War.

If Twitter existed back then, pro-Nazi and pro-Soviet commentators would be ridiculing those ideals and instead arguing that the only path to peace would be British surrender next. But the allies weren’t deterred back then and neither should you now.

And we don’t need another world war to recognise that the international system already needs another fundamental upgrade.

There is no other way all this ends regardless. If Russia’s aggression succeeds against Ukraine, this era of aggression only gets worse and lasts longer. There will be no era of peace until a better rules-based world is achieved, whether that takes weeks, years, or centuries.

So instead of obsessing too much over a hypothetical World War Three, or worse, rewarding aggression in the hope of averting it and turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy, we should already be building World Peace Three.

The Baltic countries have already been pushing for this World Peace III together, including with fundamental reforms of the Security Council and more inclusion of civic societies and smaller nations in global decision making. That’s better for everyone, everywhere, in countries big and small.