Alarming references to the imminence of World War Three are so commonplace nowadays that word has finally reached the CEO of JP Morgan. Where many generals eagerly go, the bankers follow.

In a recent speech, coinciding with the bank’s latest results, Jamie Dimon ranked geopolitical tensions as far more worrying than who would win the US election or whether the US economy would have a hard or soft landing.

He put the blame on “an evil axis” – Russia, Iran and North Korea – with China in the supporting cast for trying to dismantle the post-1945 international order, with “battles on the ground being co-ordinated in multiple countries”. This means, Dimon claims, that World War Three has already started.

The only identifiable source he mentioned was a Washington Post op-ed by neoconservative commentator George Will which said we are witnessing a “gathering storm,” for no such war talk is complete without reference to Churchill. This in turn enables diplomacy to be downgraded into “appeasement”, as it has been for most of my long adult life, replete with a cast of “little Hitlers” from Nasser to Saddam.

But are we, in fact, already living through World War Three? Fortunately, no. Granted, superficially viewed, live conflicts in one theatre are ramifying in others. Iran and North Korea do indeed supply Russia with large volumes of missiles and artillery shells, while 10,000 North Korean soldiers have deployed in the vicinity of Kursk, Ukraine’s modest toehold within Vladimir Putin’s vast empire.

And to remind everyone that they are nuclear-armed powers, in recent days Russia tested all three elements of its nuclear triad while Pyongyang lobbed a new ICBM over Japan.

But these conflicts do not join up. What evidence is there that Russia (let alone China) is helping Iran to mitigate the annihilation of its Arab proxies, or providing modern air defences to upset Israel’s blithe bombing incursions into its airspace?

Constantly talking about an “axis” does not make it a reality either. For sure, the so-called revisionist powers sense that American dominance is waning, and that they have an opportunity to displace an evanescent unipolar moment with a multipolar one.

Judging by the recent Brics summit in Kazan, that vision is sufficiently compelling for 30 more countries wishing to join this economic alliance, including Western allies such as Turkey, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia who would be joining such existing pro-Western members as Brazil, India and the UAE.

A lot of hedging is going on. Western fixation on Russian depredations in Ukraine, while supporting Israel’s depredations on seven fronts, has also led many states in the Global South to flirt with alternative players – notably China, which can deploy colossal amounts of development funding and know-how. It has not fought a major war in 45 years and it has one overseas military base. The US has 700-plus bases and it has been at war for decades, seemingly to little effect.

Many Americans have wearied of the costs in blood and treasure of acting as the world’s self-appointed sheriff. That is why about half of them seem eager to vote for Trump, though he is far from being an “isolationist”. He may be instinctively wary of entangling alliances and he is dodgy on Russia, but there are plenty in his immediate circle who would love Israel to finish off Iran before turning to a showdown with Beijing, whose real offence against the US is not menacing Taiwan but technological prowess; its nuclear engineering, for example, is 10 or 15 years ahead of the US.

Having conjured the axis into existence – for what exactly do a Shia theocracy and the atheist Chinese Communist Party have in common? – US policy effectively pushes them together by, for example, extending sanctions on Russia to secondary ones on Chinese firms which continue to supply Russia with dual-use goods. A smarter approach would be to explore peeling off members of the “axis”, whether by co-operating with China in areas where that is possible, such as climate mitigation, regulating AI and avoiding nuclear proliferation, or reviving talks with Iran, whose new president seems eager to reanimate Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal. That would also entail explaining to Benjamin Netanyahu that his relentless belligerence and egregious violation of civilised conduct are not shared by the American people.

Proponents of the idea that we are already engaged in World War Three also rely on various sleights of hand regarding the definition of war. Much was made of “hybrid war” – though it came and then vanished in 2014 – as well as cyber warfare, though fighting in eastern Ukraine since 2022 seems to be a regular attritional slog amidst the mud and ruins. Pointing to troll farms and misinformation as evidence of a “grey war” between East and West forgets that political subversion has been a constant of modern wars, for example the incitement of Arab, Irish or Polish rebellion in the First World War. Admittedly the internet has made it a great deal easier, but these things should not have us hastening into (non-existent) nuclear shelters.

Instead of scaring ourselves with mindless talk of future world wars, we need to intelligently neutralise potential adversaries by appealing to their economic self-interest, bolstering the capabilities of our diplomatic representation, and working to strengthen an international architecture by loosening the iron grip which a few of 1945’s victor powers have on it.

That does not have to entail abandoning Ukraine, whose fight with Russia is a just one. If it falls to Europe to carry that fight, then so be it, for Europe’s defences are massively superior to anything that Putin can muster, including two nuclear-armed powers and three times the defence budget.

If that is how a President Trump wants it, fine. But this in itself will further undermine America’s claim to hegemony, which would be no bad thing. The US would have to consider the views of others rather than assuming that the vassals will just trail along in its wake, if and when America has its war with China – a war which is not in our interests, whatever generals and bankers may claim.