After the initial COVID phases nothing major really changed long term as far as the world balance goes though. Everyone got affected, everyone started recovering. Things may have been uneven, but not like now, right?
Up until WWII happened I doubt many people would have believed that sort of death and destruction was right around the corner. They'd just had WWI and weren't expecting that settling the unsettled business from that would be around 3x worse, break the European colonialists and ... I don't know how wiped out Jews in Europe were, but it was a painful experience although I assume some survived. The property damage was also extensive.
High tariffs isn't going to be the end of the world & this particular stage of crisis doesn't look very important. But the overall geopolitical crisis we're in as everyone realigns certainly could end the world as we know it. Both in the literal and worst case senses. Few went in to WWII chuckling and saying that they were going to break their own power permanently, but that is what a lot of participants ended up doing.
Just a comment, every catastrophe has victims, survivors, and lasting consequences. I didn't mean to trivialize that in my response. Regardless, life goes on.
In the sense that members of the human race will survive, sure. That Woodward book out recently was suggesting a double-digit chance for a nuke to get used in Ukraine. Hopefully he is prone to making things up - seems possible that life would not have been going on in at least some regions.
I simultaneously take comfort from the fact that no-one else seems as worried as me and dread from the fact that it'd be the 3rd world war that people just walked into because they weren't taking the threat seriously enough. We appear to have been watching insane policy come out of the US diplomatic establishment for a good decade now. And the crisis is still escalating.
But who knows?! Maybe this is the time...