World War II, catalyzed by the Treaty of Versailles’ punitive legacy and exacerbated by interwar economic collapse, ideological extremism, and imperial revanchism, erupted as a global conflagration of total war. The Axis powers, driven by fascist expansionism and racial supremacism, destabilized a fragile international order already strained by appeasement and isolationism. The war’s aftermath reconfigured geopolitical fault lines: Europe bifurcated under Cold War polarity, colonial empires unraveled amid nationalist fervor, and the nascent United Nations emerged as a paradoxical custodian of peace shaped by the victors’ hegemonic interests. Beneath the rubble lay a redefined modernity—traumatized, nuclearized, and ideologically polarized.