There is much talk of a third wold war, set off either by the crisis in Ukraine or the spread of ISIS. How does our attitude differ from the way populations in Germany or Japan experienced the run-up to the previous world war, which we thought they should have been able to prevent?

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While most people focus on the how dramatic the Paris raids were, or how brave the Parisians in its aftermath, I keep wondering how different, if at all, the current situation is from the months or weeks before previous wars. Or rather, how different the present may feel to us from the way the lead-up to World War II felt to the Germans or the Japanese.

Although there have been many wars since that time, I'm deliberately taking World War II as an example because what today may be leading up to would not be a localized Korean War, or a Vietnamese War, but World War III. And I cannot help but come back again and again to this nagging thought that future generations will wonder how a relatively highly educated world polity could have let a war to end the planet happen.

One of the problems with anticipating the 'next' (or current) war is defining it. For centuries, wars have been between countries. Before that, they were between religions, and long before that, between tribes. The war we appear to have already entered fits none of these categories neatly. It is not a war ''of' civilizations, but a war between several different kinds of cultures: between authoritarian and "freedom-loving" or licentious cultures, which partly overlaps social democracy versus unbridled capitalism, the Judeo-Christian world versus the Islamic world and the North versus the South.

What throws a monkey-wrench into even these broad categories is the fact that, probably for the first time in history, a small group of humans have decided that war is an ideal way to make money, with the added advantage of killing off large numbers of resource-consuming humans on a planet that will soon need life support itself.

Authors Website: http://www.otherjonesii.blogspot.com

Authors Bio:

Born in Phila, I spent most of my adolescent and adult years in
Europe, resulting over time in several unique books, my latest being Russia's Americans.

CUBA: Diary of a
Revolution, Inside the Cuban Revolution with Fidel, Raul, Che, and Celia
Sanchez

Lunch with Fellini,
Dinner with Fidel: An Illustrated Personal Journey from the Cold War to the
Arab Spring

America Revealed to a
Honey-Colored World

A Taoist Politics: The
Case For Sacredness

I began my journalistic career at the French News Agency in Rome,
spent two years in Cuba finding out whether the Barbados were Communists before
they made the revolution ('Cuba 1964: When the Revolution was Young'). After
spending half a decade in Eastern Europe, and a decade in the U.S., studying
Global Survival and writing speeches in the Carter State Department, I wrote
the only book that foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall AND the dissolution of
the Soviet Union ("Une autre Europe, un autre Monde'). My memoir, 'Lunch
with Fellini, Dinner with Fidel', tells it all. 'A Taoist Politics: The Case
for Sacredness', which examines the similarities between ancient wisdom and
modern science and what this implies for political activism; and 'America Revealed
to a Honey-Colored World" is a pamphlet about how the U.S. came down from
the City on a Hill'.