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Maybe you should get your history correct. Before WW1 we were not in a situation where there were constant great power wars. There were limited wars 1860-1870 (Crimea, Franco-Prussian) but thats all , the last large great powers war was Napoleon and that was 120 years before WW1.

So from the Numbers one can argue that we are today still in a sitiation of endless struggle and we should expect a major war very soon.

I dont think that argument holds much water. Most nations before WW1 did not want war, just as now.

Also the idea that Germany is to small for the World is strange, because Britain was smaller, and before WW1 Germany had a huge population and industrial base. Germany had bad strategy, not a bad position.

In the years just before WWI, the Balkan Wars involved the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary, which were great powers in their day. There was also that little problem in the Russian Empire in 1917. The latter part of the 19th century had the unification of Germany, the Austro-Prussian War, and the Franco-Austrian War of 1859. The United Kingdom managed to keep their wars far from home for the latter half of the 19th century, except for a problem with Ireland.

Yes the Balkan Wars involved Great Powers, but its not like we have no wars that 'involve' great powers now (looking at you Syria). So again, from 1870 until 1914 there were very few wars, the hole population of europe basically had not experienced war.

I would thus argue that the world of 1914 was not more inherently in a great power struggle then we are now.

Crimean War was not limited at all. It was waged in way larger area than just Crimea, and here I mean not only the Black Sea surroundings. It also had a Baltic Sea, a White Sea and even a Pacific theater of war, with close to two million people involved directly. Although not as big as the entire chain of Napoleonic Wars before, it was major and extensive nevertheless.

> In a peaceful, trade-based world, Russia is a bit player. Especially since the price of oil tanked.

In a "peaceful, trade-based world" you may find that nations with scarce resources are no longer willing to pump it out at prices set in City of London.

> two superpowers with nuclear overkill capability glaring at each other but not doing much.

Those glares killed a lot of people in proxy wars around the globe.

True, but not remotely on the scale of a world war. And it is not as if those other regions were peaceful until the cold war came along. I mean, regular warfare has been the way of the world for thousands of years. The old war is sometimes referred to by historians as the long peace.

I've read Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers too (good book). However it's hard to see how the Great Powers "model" applies when everyone has nuclear weapons or can acquire them relatively easily.

Arguably, it stopped applying when everybody got serious firepower in the run-up to WWI. But WWI happened anyway.

One key difference nuclear weapons make is that it is much easier to see beforehand how catastrophic a war would be.

Mass destruction (chemical) weapons existed and were employed in WW1. You'd expect that WW2 should have consisted mostly by aerial bombardment with much improved chemical (and other kind of horribly effective) weapons, yet what happened was an abstinence from both sides, respecting a mutual agreement of resorting to conventional weapons only. (Well, on battlefields at least, and only if discounting U.S. show off with nuclear ones at a moment when the war's conclusion was clear already.)

The pre-WWI model of Europe, an endless struggle between Great Powers which had gone on for a millennium, is Putin's model of the world

Who plays Hindenburg in this scenario?