Have we psyched ourselves up for a war already? Moving from a unipolar world to a multipolar world was always likely to be messy and risk-prone. But few saw how fast we had moved from beating war drums to actual armed conflict between the Great Powers. Are we on a march to World War Three or have key players lost sight of reality? Lest we forget, the first and second world wars were fought to keep down rising powers Germany and Japan. Russia and China suffered the most casualties in World War II, and both were allies against the German Nazis and Japanese militarists. The real winner, the United States, then embarked on a war to contain communism in both the Soviet Union and China. Fifty years ago in 1972, US president Richard Nixon set aside enmity against China, restored US-China relation s, and in one strategic stroke isolated the Soviet Union, leading to its collapse two decades later. The great achievement during the Cold War was the avoidance of nuclear conflict, with the 1961 Cuban missile crisis being a live test of brinkmanship. Both sides climbed down when the USSR removed missiles from Cuba and the US quietly removed missiles from Turkey. President John F. Kennedy understood that grandstanding on moral issues should be restrained because in a nuclear war, mutually assured destruction is madness. After seven decades of peace, the Western media has begun painting the multipolar world as a black-and-white conflict of good versus evil, democracy versus autocracy , without appreciating that the other side may have a different point of view that needs to be heard. By definition, a multipolar world means that liberal democracies will have to live with different ideologies and regimes. Today, the internet provides a wealth of alternative views to those of mainstream media outlets such as CNN or the BBC. John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and author of the influential book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, offers the insight that it was the Western expansion of Nato which caused Russia to feel threatened. In essence, Russia wants a buffer zone of neutral countries like Austria which are not members of Nato, but that does not exclude trade with all sides. The more Nato tries to arm Ukraine, the more insecure Russia becomes. Carnegie Moscow Centre analyst Alexander Baunov notes that “the two sides appear to be negotiating over different things. Russia is talking about its own security, while the West is focusing on Ukraine’s”. What he is describing are two sides each in their own social bubble, or virtual reality (VR) metaverse , deaf to the other side’s views. The term “metaverse” comes from the 1992 dystopian sci-fi novel Snow Crash , in which it refers to a virtual refuge from an anarchic world controlled by the Mafia. Today, the metaverse is an online platform which blends VR with the real, flesh-and-blood world using software such as VR glasses. In other words, in the metaverse, the mind is colonised by whatever virtual information it receives, whether real or fake news. The metaverse is an escape from reality, and will not help us solve real-world problems, especially when we need to talk eyeball to eyeball. Designers of the metaverse are more interested in feeding us what we want to hear or see, rather than the information we need to make good decisions. The risk is that while we may think VR conflict is harmless, real war has real, flesh-and-blood costs. In short, the more we look inward at our own metaverse, the more we neglect the collective costs to the world as it lurches from peace to war. Surprisingly, I have found the right-wing Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson asking better questions than CNN or BBC commentators. On a recent episode of his show Tucker Carlson Tonight titled “How will this conflict affect you?”, he asked bluntly: why should Americans hate Putin, and what will war cost ordinary Americans? Though his views are partisan, Carlson asks some serious questions: have Democrats, in their moral imperative to hate Putin, forgotten the broader implications of war? For example, would Americans be willing to go into a winter war with Russia? Qatar warns it can’t fill breach if Russian gas supplies to Europe cut Secondly, would they pay much higher energy prices, given that oil has already surpassed US$100 per barrel? Not even Europe, despite imposing economic sanctions , would be willing to risk being cut off by Russia, which supplies more than 35 per cent of its gas. Thirdly, is Ukraine a real democracy? Over the next decade, we may face a tough period of escalating conflicts at local, regional and global levels, with proxy wars that disrupt our economies and social stability. If states fail, and poor and hungry people are forced to migrate at a larger scale to wealthy countries in the Global North, yet more border conflicts are likely. There is no ideal world in which one side is purely good and the other side is irredeemably bad. In a multipolar world, there will be all kinds of people that we do not like, but have to live with. A negotiated peace is better than mutual destruction. In the metaverse, virtual life can be beautiful, moral and perfect, but the real world is lurching towards a collective nightmare. We should not kid ourselves that the metaverse of self-deception is the real world. We either sleepwalk to war, or have the courage to opt for sustainable peace. The real question is, who is willing to climb down and eat humble pie for the sake of peace? Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective