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That is absolutely not what happened. The war was inevitable at this point. It is not surprising that the killing of the archduke lead to the war, it is surprising that it had taken so long for something to lit powder keg.
Yes, the world at that point was a powder keg, and you can name at least a dozen incidents before the assassination that could have set it off. The assassination was far from the root cause, but it was the proximate event in a spiral.
The world is in a similar state today, and normalcy bias is what prevents us from seeing it. Seemingly minor events can trigger repercussions far out of expectations if conditions are right.
Not really.
There were two main dynamics to the state of geopolitical affairs that let WW1 be WW1. One was the treaty situation, in which most involved states on both sides had staked their security policies / international prestige / credibility that they also needed for other interests into the alliance system. The second was the fact that four great powers (France, UK, Germany, Russia) were competing for influence in a very constrained geopolitical area (peninsular Europe) that they could all project power into. The later is what led to the former is what led to the domino effect.
There is no equivalent concentration of competition or overlap of treaties. As much as the Russians have tried to style a [insert term of choice for grouping] of resistance to the US amongst Iran, Russia, NK, and China, the relationship between them has been fundamentally transactional, not alliance based, and the last few years have emphasized that. The US alliance network similarly does have overlapping effects- there are very few obligations (by design) for out-of-regional issues. Relatedly, most of the non-US actors in the modern system cannot project power to each other if they wanted to, and most US allies in different regions cannot and would not project power to the other as a 'we will fight together' sort of way.
Another reason for WW1 is that for millennia, being belligerent was a net positive to states in most cases. I mean, obviously having a war was always net negative (unless the alternative was starvation, perhaps), but in earlier times, it had at least been a good deal for the elites (and arguably even some of the commoners, though not the commoners finding themselves in the path of an army) on the winning side. The militant nationalism of the 1800s was a consequence of that.
But by 1910, the underlying reality had changed, because weapon systems had gotten a lot more deadly and railroad logistics limited the land gains made from offensive operations, leading to the trench stalemates. Suddenly being belligerent was maladaptive. Few politicians or populations would have been enthusiastic about starting WW1 if they had known the meat grinder it would become. Instead, they were enthusiastic -- finally a chance to kick some hated foreigner's butt again, like in the good old times. Instead they got Verdun.
When WW2 started, there was a lot less enthusiasm all around, because most participants were not looking forward to more industrialized warfare.
Excellent addition. Especially as not only have the costs of war risen since then, but so have the costs of occupation post-'victory.'
AKs and RPGs were enough to break the cost-benefit logic of emperial economies, and IEDs and manpads could make even 'less total' occupations prohibitively expensive. The modern development of drones are an even greater obstacle to projecting power at a, well, global scale.
This doesn't mean a 'world war' is impossible, but it really does beg the question of who is going to be fighting where how. The US ability at power projection is absolutely going to be hemmed in in the weeks/months/years/decades to come, but so is everyone else.
Total informational blackout, facial ID systems and military drones are going to make occupations much less painful. If you can conduct head counts, track every single person with with cameras or transponders and run AIs to spot suspicious activity, anomalous food use or insurgent activity, war of conquest gets a lot easier.
Also, the age of hobbyist level drones being militarily useful against China or Chinese friendly states ends 5 years from now, at worst.
...until you get outside of the cities with the infrastructure to support a constant surveillance system. Which is to say, most of any given country, including China.
Smart city technologies are indeed a significant counter-insurgency technology. They are not, however, the end-all-be-all, particularly if you have to fight your way into a country to install your own. 'I won't have this problem if I set up a nation-wide panopticon' still requires you to set up a nation-wide panopticon, and those are expensive even without active local and regional resistance, let alone global support flows from cyber attacks / satellite communication support / sanctuary and safezone logistics / etc.
Seeing as drones are proliferating on the battlefield, in 20 years a platoon is going to have an APC with a server rack with more intelligence than an small office building of west pointers and a dozen recon drones in the air at all times.
Between everyone having a phone which can be easily turned into a snitch that keeps track of where you go and military drones, keeping the population surveilled and preventing it from feeding or aiding guerrillas is going to be a lot easier.
They were doing this in Xinyang. Every single person had to use a phone with a tracking app, they were also checking in arrivals at every single building, probably noting who was in close proximity. This isn't even SF, this is present day counter-insurgency
Tell me, how are there going to be 'cyber attacks' when the army will go around methodically securing or destroying all satellite comms on the grounds of them being security risks ? And the national fiber network is of course not going to be left in place, it's going to be severed from the internet and any channels going in or out are going to be approved by some paranoid AI system ?
Setting up a nation-wide panopticon is only as hard as is forcing the population, at gunpoint, to install the right brand of spyware app onto their phone.
Not very hard at all. They need the phones for most financial operations and they use either android or apple, so you need two kinds of apps to use lol. Verrry difficult. I'm sure there's going to be 3-4 Chinese vendors of such apps fiercely competing with each other over features.
With global IQ of 90 and AI, spyware apps are probably going to come into fashion to prevent silicon mischief.
And if we ignore all the other requirements, it's only as hard as the exceedingly hard and expensive part that will take a substantial period of time and be subject to all sorts of expensive disruptions.
Which returns to assuming the conclusion, or rather assuming you have the police state in place to pre-empt the problem that could prevent the establishment of the police state following an invasion.
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