> but I guess there doesn’t always have to be a Franz Ferdinand moment?

The official start of WWI was a month after Franz Ferdinand's assassination, even though it's so heavily identified nowadays as "the start of the war". It's entirely possible that in the future, the instigating event will be identified as something that already happened and it's just taking a while for the shooting to start as alliances solidify, and that people who think we're already in WWIII have the same "the instigating event is the start of the war" association.

Russia's incursion into Ukraine near the end of February could, for example, end up being it.

I agree with Fiona: the clear nuclear threat was over the line. Freezing the assets of the central bank of Russia was also unimaginable a month ago (they are not Venezuela). That's why I used the words containing/deescalating.

According to Fiona Hill that is not the definition of a world war. World Wars have been defined by battles in multiples countries and continents.

The Syrian civil war was over 15 countries and factions. War in Afghanistan over 5 countries, technically much more.

None of these wars were consider WW3, and just because the war between Ukraine and Russia is in Europe doesn’t make it any different.

If I learned anything about Tsars history, most of them do not get to have a natural death.

The factors in World War 2 were much different, public sentiment didn’t matter. Nazis would have taken Poland in 1939 and pursue the Soviet Union sooner, it was inevitably a World War. World War 1 was editable.

World War 1 was very much avoidable. Time and time again World War 1 has been called unnecessary because the original dispute that triggered the conflict was limited.

There were people who foresaw, if not perfectly, how bad WWI would be, and tried to stop it. Many of them were socialists - Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany, Jean Jaurès in France for example - and their final hope was that the proletariat of the European nations would not fight against one another, but we know how that turned out.

The problem was that there were not enough who were afraid, and that goes for WWII too.

There is also the view, which I think has considerable merit, which regards WWII in Europe as a continuation of WWI, and the Pacific war as a largely separate, though concurrent, event.

There is a thought provoking book about how terrible the repercussions of WWI really were. The author claims the world was on the verge of a renaissance in technology, medicine, energy, music, trade, etc. The thought of a world war was incomprehensible at the time—no one believed it could happen. Who knows how the world would look today without WWI.

(If any one is interested in the book I will hunt it down as I don’t remember the name).

I think the point is that WWI was precipitated by a chain of events that could have, in theory, easily been interrupted if the belligerents had been sufficiently fearful of conflict.

The "August Madness" is sometimes how this gets summed up. Novels/movies like All's Quiet on the Western Front make this point, too.

Ukrainians using anti-tank weapons to fight on their own land against a different nation trying to take ownership of the country is the definition of defence.

Escalation is what Russia is doing: cluster munitions, rolling elite troops in, and shelling apartment buildings. Sending weapons to the people who live there to fend off invaders, and imposing sanctions is a fairly tepid response.