Well I sense that it was just a bunch of things that accumulated over the years, like kindling building up.
Eventually some spark was going to go off and light the thing up. The “Old Order” of Europe in its last gasp to stay relevant. I often wonder how different the world would have been today if not for WWI. But some conflict was inevitable.
There was a great article in the American Heritage magazine about it a decade ago or so. Another was pretty good, too. I still have them somewhere. 1 of them was “how we lost our innocence from WWI”. It was really good.