We are not the innocent descendants of generations that failed to understand. We are the generation that inherited their graves, studied their errors, repeated their vows, and nevertheless resumed their march. Nothing necessary for judgment remains hidden from us. The road is known, its consequences are known, and the choice before us is known.
Civilizations have never required perfect knowledge in order to recognize the approach of destruction. They have required only sufficient truth to change their course, and they have repeatedly chosen not to do so. History records neither intentions nor professions. It records choices and reveals their consequences.
Five years ago, the prospect of a third world war still appeared confined to history. Today it has entered military planning, strategic doctrine, weapons production and the daily calculations of governments. Such a transformation is not yet catastrophe, but it is evidence of the direction in which we have chosen to move.
Within scarcely five years, economic rivalry has become economic warfare; economic warfare has become proxy war; proxy war has given way to increasingly direct confrontation; military expenditure has risen sharply; restraints established after the last global catastrophe have been weakened or abandoned; and nations increasingly measure their security by the destructive power they can command.
None of these developments, considered alone, establishes that a third world war is inevitable. Considered together, however, they compel a question that cannot honestly be avoided: if this has been the course of merely five years, by what principle of reason should another five years upon the same course be expected to end elsewhere?
Every generation confronts the same temptation. It knows that survival requires restraint, yet persuades itself that one further escalation is prudent, one further mobilisation necessary, one further act of force justified, and one further abandonment of restraint too small to determine the outcome. Decisions defended as reasonable in isolation thereby accumulate into consequences that no one claims to have intended.
This is how civilizations approach catastrophe: not through one inexplicable act of madness, but through a succession of choices, each defended by an immediate necessity and each made easier by the choice that preceded it. No single step appears decisive. Together they determine the direction.
There comes a moment when the question is no longer whether any government desires catastrophe. The question is whether the repeated choices of many governments are producing it. Intentions cannot answer that question. Only consequences can.
The measure of a civilization is not what it professes to value when noble language carries no cost. It is what it chooses when fear demands courage, ambition demands restraint, pride demands humility, and power demands responsibility. Those choices, repeated often enough, constitute the conduct by which that civilization must be judged.
The warning before us is neither partisan nor ideological. It concerns the survival of civilization itself. Civilizations have travelled this road before under other names, beneath other flags and with less destructive means. Each time, they knew enough to turn back. Each time, they found reasons to continue.
We know where unchecked escalation leads. We know that no nation can indefinitely increase danger while presuming that every opponent will retreat. We know that weapons prepared for use increase the probability of being used, that alliances created for deterrence may become chains of obligation, and that wars begun as limited conflicts do not necessarily remain limited because those who began them intended them to be so.
The privilege of choosing has never included the privilege of escaping the consequences of those choices.
The choice is therefore neither hidden nor deferred. It is being made now, with every escalation accepted as necessary and every act of restraint dismissed as weakness. If we continue upon this course, whatever consequences follow can no longer honestly be attributed to ignorance. They will arise from choices made in full view of where similar choices have led before.
harri Ihring, Geneva, July 14th, 2026
