There's a way of looking at history that should unsettle us: great conflicts don't erupt overnight. They simmer slowly, piece by piece, while most people go about their daily lives convinced that "this won't touch me." In the 1930s, while chancelleries moved their pieces, rearmed their militaries, and normalized rhetoric that would have seemed unthinkable a decade earlier, millions of young Europeans were living ordinary lives — working, falling in love, listening to the radio. They didn't notice the world reorganizing itself around them until it was their turn to live through it, and maturity arrived all at once, with no warning, delivered in blows.
Today the pieces are moving again, and there's no need to speculate: the facts are in the news every week. Economic blocs are closing in on themselves: the trade and tariff war between the United States and China has intensified, and international trade is increasingly tied openly to national security interests rather than free markets. Energy has once again become a tool of geopolitical pressure: Europe's energy dependence on external supplies remains a bargaining lever, while Washington grants or withdraws oil-sale licenses depending on whatever suits its diplomatic interests at the moment. And war rhetoric has been normalized in the media and in official discourse with a casualness that would have been unthinkable ten years ago: people talk about rearmament, about defense-spending targets of 5% of GDP, about "rightsizing" armed forces, as if these were just economic figures rather than decisions that prepare entire societies for war.
Against this backdrop, concrete facts keep piling up. In the United States, the Trump administration has begun withdrawing from dozens upon dozens of international organizations and scaling back commitment to traditional alliances. At the same time, U.S. European Command has announced a significant reduction in its contribution to NATO's force structure, with cuts to fighter aircraft, maritime reconnaissance, and refueling capacity that further weaken deterrence in Europe — just as allies are being told to shoulder a much greater military burden themselves. Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine is now entering its fifth year with no end in sight, while the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia is set to expire with no one knowing what, if anything, will replace it.
In Europe, the political drift is just as revealing. A recent study by more than 150 political scientists across 31 countries found that the share of the vote going to far-right parties has climbed above 23%, up from about 10% a decade ago and just 5% in 1995. Austria's Freedom Party has gone from 16% to 29%, France's National Rally has surged to 37% and become the largest single party in the French parliament, and Germany's AfD has doubled its support to 21%, finishing as the country's second-largest party for the first time. This is not a marginal or passing phenomenon: these parties are already part of coalition governments in several states and already shape decisions at the level of the European Union.
This pattern is nothing new. Germany in the 1930s is the most studied example, and the parallel is unsettling precisely because it wasn't a nation of committed fanatics — it was a distracted nation. Hitler came to power legally in January 1933, appointed chancellor by Hindenburg, with no sudden coup. A month later, the Reichstag fire served as the pretext for suspending basic civil rights — press, assembly, speech — as a "temporary" measure against terrorism, and much of society accepted it as normal. In March, parliament itself voted away its own relevance through the Enabling Act, passed by a wide majority on the argument that stability was needed after years of Depression and more than six million unemployed. The April 1933 boycott of Jewish-owned businesses was public and announced in the newspapers beforehand, and many people showed up to it as if it were just another everyday event. Within months, unions, universities, media outlets, and cultural associations were absorbed or dissolved — the Gleichschaltung — and much of the public experienced it as mere administrative reorganization, not as the disappearance of every social check and balance. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were passed amid a festive party congress, complete with parades and music, while in parallel the systematic persecution of part of the population was being written into law. A year later, the Berlin Olympics showed the world an apparently normal country, and much of the international community — and much of German society itself — took that as proof that whatever was brewing "couldn't be that bad." As journalist Milton Mayer put it after interviewing ordinary German citizens in They Thought They Were Free: the change was so gradual that each day felt just like the one before, until suddenly the world was unrecognizable.
And meanwhile, today, a significant part of the youth lives installed in a parallel world: screens, social media, instant messaging, a constant stream of stimuli designed to keep attention captured here and now. This isn't a cheap shot at young people — the system is built precisely to generate that disconnection, because a distracted citizen is a citizen who doesn't ask uncomfortable questions. But the result is the same however you look at it: a generation that knows the codes of a social network inside out, and knows far less about how a democracy gets dismantled, or how a conflict heats up until it becomes irreversible.
History doesn't repeat itself identically, but it rhymes. If things keep drifting this way, it wouldn't be surprising if this generation had to grow up all at once, like their grandparents did — not by choice, but because reality comes knocking without asking permission. The difference is that those grandparents, despite the propaganda of their time, lived in a world with fewer distractions and, paradoxically, perhaps with more collective awareness of what was happening around them. Today's youth has access to more information than ever before, and at the same time risks being the most uninformed generation about what actually matters.
This isn't about spreading alarmism, but about inviting a look beyond the screen: understanding that peace isn't a default state, but a fragile balance that must be actively watched and sustained. Because once the foundations are already laid, the building can go up far faster than we think.