For its 27 January 2018 edition, The Economist dedicated its cover to ‘The Next War’ with a special report on the new battlegrounds of geopolitical competition. Days earlier, the World Economic Forum issued its annual Global Risks Report 2018, which assessed that the risk of political and economic confrontations between major powers, including outright military conflicts, had risen sharply. This risk is accompanied by a rise in ‘charismatic strongman politics’ and exacerbated by a decline in support for rules-based multilateralism. Shortly after these two publications, the American Bulletin of Atomic Scientists issued a warning that growing nuclear threats, climate change, and a lack of trust in political institutions are bringing the world ever closer to ‘apocalypse’. To make their message explicit, they moved forward their symbolic Doomsday Clock, bringing it the closest to midnight that it has been since 1953 at the height of the Cold War.

These risk assessments are in stark contrast to the optimism that followed the end of the Cold War. In the 1990s, the prospect of state-on-state conflict had retreated considerably. There were still violent conflicts, but they were mostly within, rather than between countries. Even after the Second Iraq War, optimism prevailed. Science writer Stephen Pinker has been one of the most prominent voices making the case that, historically, violence has significantly declined. He argues that a careful examination of long-term trends shows how violence has steadily gone down across a wide variety of indicators, including in the numbers and intensity of wars, genocides, and other mass killings.

Indeed, many historians agree that global violence over the past few decades is lesser in scale as compared to humanity's experience of war over the last several millennia.