IRONIC isn’t it? As we approach the centenary of the war to end all wars, never, or at least not since the Cuban missile crisis, has the world been closer to the real war to end all wars; the one where everyone gets blown up.

Far-fetched you may say, but no one seriously believed a global conflict could possibly happen before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. And the idea that the world is too closely linked together for another colossal war is no new concept, either.

In 1910 Norman Angell argued, in his book The Great Illusion, that economic interdependence between industrial countries meant war would be economically harmful to all involved.

But four years later, everyone was at it.

That episode of wholesale human slaughter should have been enough to bring politicians to their senses. They even devised The League of Nations to make sure war could never break out again.

It didn’t even last two decades.

So why do wars start? Usually by accident, always as a result of posturing and boy are we seeing plenty of that at the moment.

However, the most worrying isn’t on display in Gaza or Syria, it’s not even the menacing rebels watching over what’s left of MH17. Once again it’s between Russia and the United States.

President Obama says their relationship is “complicated”. He’s not kidding. Worse still, the US released satellite images on Sunday that it says show rockets have been fired from Russia into eastern Ukraine. The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee belligerently insists this is “an act of war”.

Those pictures were enough to spur even Germany into calling for tougher and more extensive economic sanctions against Russia.

Fortunately, for world peace, these measures don’t yet amount to much. Neither will the oligarchs find their London mansions being repossessed. Perhaps they should; Putin might finally take notice if they started to complain.

That said, his central bank is having to spend billions of dollars defending the rouble, and while Russia may not be the force it once was, the country has a history of going for the jugular when backed into a corner.

Which is the real worry. And if any form of conflict were to break out between east and west, there are plenty of other countries eager to jump on the bandwagon, looking for any excuse to grind their axes.

Take the Middle East, where most states would love to see the back of Israel. With a nuclear Iran, they just might stand a chance. There is no love lost between India and Pakistan, while militants are creating massive instability in Libya, Burma, Tunisia and Somalia.

The conflicts in Southern Sudan and the Central African Republic are a major worry, then there is the terrifying rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria and ISIS in Syria and Iraq, not to mention the mess we left in Afghanistan.

The world is a tinderbox waiting to spark and although the spectre of all-out nuclear war may no longer haunt us, modern conventional warfare is not much less hideous, just look at the pictures from Gaza. And as Europe discovered in 1914, the domino effect created by a local conflict is far too easily set off.

All it needs is a trigger and if Russia really has fired into Ukraine, we now have one. Any retaliation would would be seen by Putin as an act of war and that would be that; a defenceless East European country being invaded by a military superpower.

Oh God, haven’t we been here before?