The global consensus against armed conflict continues to unravel as governments increasingly budget for and normalize warfare.
Foreign Affairs reported that the world has steadily accepted war as an inevitable feature of international relations over the past decade. This shift marks a dangerous departure from the post-World War II order, which explicitly outlawed wars of aggression and framed armed conflict as a failure of statecraft.
The Escalation of Global Conflict and Defense Spending
Active conflicts have doubled over the last fifteen years, creating a humanitarian and geopolitical crisis unseen in generations. According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, there were 65 active conflicts involving governments in 2025, exactly double the number recorded in 2010.
Casualties have surged alongside the frequency of combat. An estimated 250,000 people died in those conflicts during 2025, marking the highest annual death toll in thirty years since the Rwandan genocide. Furthermore, close to 120 million people worldwide have been forcibly displaced by ongoing warfare.
Global military budgets have surged by more than 40 percent over the past decade. Nations across the world now spend nearly $3 trillion annually on defense, an amount roughly equivalent to the entire GDP of the African continent.
Even historically restrained nations such as Denmark, Germany, Japan, and Norway are rearming rapidly. At the same time, all nine nuclear-armed states are modernizing their arsenals to boost destructive capabilities.
Artificial Intelligence Accelerates Combat Pace and Erodes Human Oversight
Artificial intelligence is accelerating the pace of combat while eroding human oversight. AI systems now automate cyberattacks against critical infrastructure, including power grids, hospitals, and financial systems.
The integration of automated decision-making into nuclear technologies poses an existential threat to global stability. By speeding up operational timelines, AI reduces the window available for human judgment and drastically elevates the risk of miscalculation.
Similar vulnerabilities emerge in biotechnology, where advanced tools lower the barriers for harmful experimentation and the development of bioweapons. These technological leaps threaten to spark planetary annihilation while diplomatic control mechanisms move at a much slower pace.
International Institutions Must Constrain State Aggression Through Maxilateralism
Addressing this trajectory requires a renewed commitment to international institutions and cooperative frameworks. Governments must relearn the art of opposing war by actively constraining the ability of states to wage aggression.
This success depends on what some leaders describe as maxilateralism—cooperation that embraces as many countries as possible rather than small, ad hoc groupings. The objective remains making war increasingly impractical and unimaginable through collective resistance.
Remaining silent in the face of escalating militarism represents an act of complicity. Civil society and international coalitions must defend the norms enshrined in the United Nations Charter to prevent another catastrophic world war.
