Historian and sociologist Andrei Fursov answered this question on the YouTube channel Our Tomorrow.
“This stage is not ahead, it is already there. The fact is that our assessment and approach to world war depends on how we define world war and what we mean by this term.
It is sometimes said that generals are always preparing for the last war. But the fact is that in the mass consciousness, and even in the consciousness of professionals, the assessment of a war, as a rule, depends on what the last war or last wars were like.
When we talk about a world war, everyone assumes that it must be something like the last World War II, or the First World War.
But the fact is that the phenomenon of world wars is not limited to these two wars.
World wars are a feature of the capitalist era, because capitalism is the only world system. And the wars for hegemony in the capitalist system have always had a global character, because it was connected with the colonies, with going beyond the borders of Europe, and so on.
And there are three types of world wars in the history of the capitalist system.
The first type is a set of local conflicts, this is the Thirty Years' War, which was waged, on the one hand, by the Habsburgs and the coalition they led, and on the other hand, there was a coalition financed by Holland.
The second type of world wars are Anglo-French wars in two rounds. This is the Seven Years' War of 1756-1763, and the Napoleonic Wars. By the way, if you add up the Seven Years War and the Napoleonic Wars, you will also get thirty years, the Thirty Years' War, but it is separated in time.
And, finally, the third type, by which we generally judge world wars, is the First and Second World Wars, although those experts and researchers who say that there was a thirty-year European great war, from 1914 to 1945, are very close to the truth. Because if we take the period between 1918 and 1939, more precisely, 1938, since the war that we call the Second began on September 28, 1938 with the Munich Agreement, these twenty years are full of wars. So it's kind of a continuum. We are dealing with thirty years of world wars, some of which are spaced apart in time, and some, therefore, last, like the First World War, thirty years.
In this regard, if we look at what is happening now, taking into account what weapons the leading world powers have that can wipe each other (from the face of the earth), I mean, first of all, the Russian Federation and the United States, apparently, the new world war will be very similar to the Thirty Years' War.
That is, it is a set of local conflicts, separated both in space and in time.
The Thirty Years' War were four local conflicts that changed the face of Europe, that drew a line under two centuries of European crisis, and of which capitalism as a system became a by-product.
In this regard, if we look at what is happening in the world right now, we already have two growing local conflicts. And both tend to be concentrated, either directly on our border, or within reach, quite.
This is the Ukraine crisis and this is the crisis unfolding in the Middle East. So now there are two hearths.
If two more centers appear, conditionally, say, the Caucasus and Central Asia, with access to our underbelly and through the Xinjiang Uygur region - to China, in my opinion, there will be every reason to talk about a new world war, which repeats, only already at the exit from the capitalist era, the Thirty Years' War.
It may be the Third, according to another calculation - the Fourth, but it is quite clear that the new world order, unfortunately, will again be born, most likely from the war. Because new world orders are always born out of wars.
The question, I think, for us should sound like this: we can drive this war away from our borders so that where the arsonists and conspirators have planned a hearth that should spread in our direction, so that it stays there, and even better turn this hearth into the side of the arsonist himself or his satellite.
As Hamlet says in Pasternak's translation: "Go, poisoned steel, to your destination".
This is where the main problem lies.
...The current war is of a different nature, and when some letters are replaced in your language with Latin ones, say, Zhara, and the letter R appears there, this is a military action in fact. This is a psychohistorical action that changes your code.
There are two options here: either we really return to the status of a great power, or the collapse of the country and the cessation of the existence of historical Russia, along with the population that inhabits it.”
The full video featuring Andrey Fursov can be viewed here.