Gideon Rachman asks whether the world is “sleepwalking into World War III?” It’s a long read, and not a terribly enlightening one. Rachman tours Ukraine, the Gulf, the Taiwan Strait and the 65 conflicts currently raging around the world, and finds the culprits to be “revisionist powers”, “strongman leaders” and an “axis of adversaries”: Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. In a couple of thousand words, he finds no space at all for the crisis of neoliberal capitalism, albeit he does note the important fact that the G7, which accounted for two-thirds of world output in 1989, is now down to 43 percent. Lenin would have recognised the connection between this decline and the attempt by declining powers to use military means to hold on to a world they can no longer dominate economically. He would have easily recognised “the striving for domination, not for freedom”. More than a century after his death, Lenin remains a far better and more relevant guide to the questions of war and peace than the FT’s chief foreign affairs commentator. Imperialism is hitting out in all directions: • Genocide in Gaza, armed and financed by Washington, London and Berlin. • US-Israeli criminal war on Iran and Lebanon. • A proxy war in Ukraine to weaken and dismember Russia. • Economic warfare against China: tariffs, chip bans, sanctions, blacklists. • A “Donroe Doctrine” under which a president is kidnapped, Cuba is placed under a genocidal energy siege, and election results are determined in Washington DC. • AUKUS, RIMPAC, Talisman Sabre, and a ring of US bases around China’s coast. None of this features as a cause of insecurity in Rachman’s telling. He’s more worried about whether Xi Jinping “considers that America’s Taiwan Relations Act means something”, or whether Putin sees NATO’s Article Five as an “iconclad commitment”. In other words, his proposed path to peace is for the US to make its threats more credible. Peace through NATO. Peace through imperialism. The real guarantee of peace is a multipolar world where no power gets to dictate terms to the rest – exactly what Rachman’s “axis of adversaries” is working towards, and exactly what the West is fighting to prevent.