Many will hate to hear this but the only solution is one world government or at least a unipolar order that reduces the survival need to participate in arms races. Arms race dynamics between nations will be the end of our species.
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That being said the only way I could imagine we'd get a single world order is one country dominating everyone else, just like superpowers and regional powers dominate their respective parts of the globe.
Never ever ever are people just going to give up their control out of some form of "enlightenment" that has never existed among the human race.
and yes, America has done that for the "pax Americana" period. unfortunately we were short-sighted and allowed people too much free reign to be stupid and anti-American.
Unprecedented levels of peace in Europe happened not because of competing nation states, but in spite of that competition. It was the unipolar control exerted by the US and the destruction of the Soviet Union and the creation of the EU (a proto pan-European state) that caused the 1990s. There was one and only pole -- the West. Not 2 (or more) different adversaries with opposed interests engaging in an arms race.
As we go back to a world with more fragmented and distributed power, we will get more war and more arms races. An especially toxic setup in the age of AI.
This doesn't have to be a binary, anyways. You could set it up as some kind of federation where there's still economic competition. Just not military competition.
Also, AFAIK all of those nations consolidated because of military conquest. Countless European wars and empires.
The EU isn't like that, but they're an alliance and not one country. You can't just leave a country like England did.