What drives the wars unfolding across multiple continents today? Are they clashes of civilisations, collisions of religions, or something more fundamental, rooted in humanity’s oldest instinct — survival? Daily reporting focuses on atrocities, assigning blame or justification. Yet beneath these narratives lies a deeper question: what systemic forces make such conflicts persist across time and geography?
On a single day, three voices illustrated the paradox. A Pakistani columnist argued that Iran operates as a rogue state outside unwritten global norms, while the United States violates written international law. A Western commentator asked how the world would react if Iran did to America what America and its allies are accused of doing to Iran. At the same time, a senior US official described Iran itself as a rogue state defined by hostility.
Each perspective carries internal logic. When opposing sides can simultaneously and plausibly accuse each other of illegitimacy, the issue is no longer simply who is right or wrong. It is about the deeper forces pushing states towards confrontation.
Samuel Huntington argued that future conflicts would follow cultural and civilisational fault lines. Yet today’s conflicts complicate that view. Many of the most intense confrontations occur within shared cultural or religious spaces: Russia and Ukraine share historical and religious roots; Pakistan and Afghanistan share deep civilisational ties; tensions within the Western hemisphere often occur among states with broadly similar cultural foundations.
If civilisation were the decisive factor, such conflicts would be far less common. The persistence of intra-civilisational conflict suggests that deeper structural dynamics are at work.
A more revealing lens is to view contemporary conflicts as struggles between systems of governance.
Liberal democracies, led by the United States and its allies, are built on institutional rule, electoral legitimacy, and market economies. Their historical evolution from the Enlightenment and industrialisation gives them a sense of ideological universality.
Ideologically rigid authoritarian states, such as Russia and Cuba, are organised around centralised political control rooted in nationalist or socialist frameworks. Their resistance to liberal models is not religious but political, grounded in preserving sovereignty and internal authority.
Theocratic systems, most notably Iran and Afghanistan under the Taliban, fuse political power with religious doctrine. Their resistance to liberal modernity is existential, as it challenges both governance and worldview.
The ongoing war is already forcing Gulf states to recalculate their alliances, not along civilisational lines, but along systemic ones
These systems did not emerge simultaneously. Liberal democracy expanded alongside industrial capitalism. Authoritarian and theocratic systems, in many cases, developed as reactions to that expansion — one through ideological resistance, the other through religious revival and post-colonial assertion.
This historical sequence helps explain the asymmetry of modern conflicts. Liberal democracies often act as expanding systems seeking to universalise norms, while others resist incorporation on their own terms.
At the heart of these conflicts lies a recurring pattern: material transformation occurs faster than ideological adaptation.
Karl Marx argued that economic structures shape political and ideological systems. Yet history shows that ideology does not adjust automatically. It resists, lags, and sometimes hardens in response to change.
This gap — between what societies materially become and what their governing ideas demand — generates tension.
Industrial Europe experienced this when feudal elites clung to outdated structures, contributing to revolutionary upheaval. The United States faced it when a slave-based social order persisted despite industrial transformation, culminating in civil war.
The same dynamic is visible today.
Iran possesses universities, advanced industries, and an educated urban population. Yet its governing ideology reflects a revolutionary theological framework that often diverges from the aspirations of parts of its society.
Russia maintains industrial and military capacity and participates in global markets, yet operates through a centralised nationalist-authoritarian model that seeks strategic dominance beyond its economic base.
Even formal democracies are not exempt. Pakistan combines electoral institutions with political cultures shaped by older power structures — feudal, military, and religious — that coexist uneasily with its modernising society.
Ideological lag, therefore, is not confined to any one system. It is a structural condition that affects all.
When systems experience this tension, survival instinct intensifies.
International law, sovereignty norms, and institutional frameworks, including those associated with the United Nations, are often upheld in principle but bypassed in practice when states perceive existential threats.
This produces a recurring pattern. Weaker actors are labelled rogue or fundamentalist when they defy norms. Stronger actors justify similar departures as necessary for stability or order. The difference lies less in behaviour than in power and narrative.
Consider the symmetry. Iran projects influence through non-state actors across multiple regions, extending its strategic reach beyond conventional limits. The United States, historically, has also used covert means to shape outcomes abroad, including the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s elected government under Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.
The scale, capacity, and consequences differ significantly. Yet the underlying logic is comparable: systems act outside formal rules when they perceive their survival or influence to be at stake.
Fundamentalism, in this sense, is not limited to religion or authoritarianism. It emerges wherever systems feel threatened.
Liberal democracies may bypass international norms while invoking universal values. Authoritarian states tighten control and project force to preserve political order. Theocratic systems harden doctrine and resist compromise to defend identity.
Across all systems, the survival instinct narrows the space for restraint.
Any framework that seeks to explain global conflict must acknowledge its own limits. Theories emerge from particular historical moments. Huntington wrote in the aftermath of the Cold War. Marx wrote during the industrial transformation of Europe.
No single framework can fully capture the complexity of human behaviour, which shifts with circumstance, leadership, and perception. What such frameworks offer is not permanent truth but a structured way of seeing patterns that might otherwise remain obscured.
The concept of wars of systems, shaped by ideological lag and survival instinct, is one such lens. It does not explain everything, but it helps connect seemingly disparate conflicts into a broader structural narrative.
The central failure of modern civilisation is not that conflicts occur, but that humanity has yet to develop institutions capable of managing systemic transformation without violence.
The United Nations represents the most ambitious attempt to create such a mechanism. Yet its limitations are evident: veto power constrains collective action, and major actors frequently bypass its authority when interests are at stake.
A peaceful transition between systems would require ideological adaptation to keep pace with material change. It would require consistency in applying legal and moral standards. It would require pathways for political evolution that do not feel like collapse, and forms of modernity that do not feel like cultural or existential erasure.
At present, these conditions remain largely unmet.
Until institutions evolve to bridge the gap between changing material realities and resistant ideological structures, conflicts between systems will persist. The survival instinct will continue to drive states towards confrontation when their position feels threatened.
What appears in daily headlines as isolated crises are, in fact, fragments of a larger and older pattern — one that humanity has not yet learned to resolve peacefully.
The ongoing war is already forcing Gulf states to recalculate their alliances, not along civilisational lines, but along systemic ones.