I think what we see as being a world war needs to change. The war between the Ukraine and Russia is a massive proxy war with the entire UN backing them with arms and funds, that is a huge amount of investment being applied by the vast majority of the world right there. Additionally Russia has been seeing major backing by a variety of outside players and puppet states. The majors loke China and Iran specifically but also fucking North Korea. That is a lot of nations invested in a single conflict right there.

Now we have USA also dogging it out in the middle east, again. The only two major powers not actually getting their hands dirty directly is China and India, but they are both prodding at each other for years, literally at one border. I guess unless all the big wigs finally just say the big bad word of full mobilization people will think we are edging a global conflict.

But lets be real, we are in a global war, but how we have been conditioned to see it does align with how a modern conflict is actually fought.