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I don't think that WW1 is a good analogy for anything going on in modern international relations. The fundamental fact about the international situation immediately before and (to a lesser extent) during WW1, which was well-understood by contemporaries, is the existence of multiple (between five and nine depending on how you count) Great Powers each of which was capable (both in terms of military power and institutional decision-making capacity) of acting independently in pursuit of its own interests, including forming and breaking alliances based on mutual interest. The only constraint on the of a Great Power is the possible opposition of other Great Powers.
@georgioz provides a long list of Great Power conflicts in the period between 1815 (the last great International Peace Conference where the then-existing Great Powers redrew the map of Europe and agreed ground rules among themselves) and 1914 - and critically not all of them are Allies vs Central Powers. You can argue about who much the UK/France/Russia vs Germany/Austria line-up results from choices made by statesmen vs. unavoidable strategic logic vs. shared values/culture, but we can see Italy and the Ottoman Empire choosing sides based on a (possibly wrong, but genuinely attempted) calculation of strategic advantage, as well as a (somewhat dysfunctional) decision-making process where the UK decides whether or not to honour the alliance with France and the guarantee to Belgium and join the war based on a calculation of its perceived advantage.
There is a reason why board games simulating pre-1914 real-world conflict tend to be multiplayer, but board games simulating post-1914 politics tend to be two player.
After Pearl Harbour, we see two models of the world, neither of which feature Great Powers. The "US hegemony" paradigm sees all states as either US clients or as rogue states. US diplomacy is more like managing troublesome vassals in Crusader Kings than, well, Diplomacy. The "United Nations vs Axis of Evil" paradigm sees the goodies as a grand alliance held together by shared values (NOT mutual interest) and where goodie countries nominally commit to not acting unilaterally in pursuit of their own selfish interests. The Axis of Evil tends to be treated as a single unified "them" even when it isn't. (Incidentally, this model provides an easy explanation of what went wrong with W's foreign policy - W thought that he was facing an Axis of Evil when in fact Iran, Iraq and al-Quaeda were different rogue states which happened to be annoying him at the same time).
Who are the plausible Great Powers nowadays? The US is still something more than one Great Power among others. China counts. Russia looks like a Great Power, but their ineptitude in Ukraine strongly suggests that they are a fake and gay Great Power. The UK and France probably still have the military power to be Great Powers (the Falklands war was the last time this was put to the test), but American hegemony is sufficiently real that (since Suez) the British and French elites think that they can't act without American permission, and accordingly neither country has the institutional capacity. (One of the reasons why British national-greatness conservatives supported Brexit was because they thought that this loss of capacity was caused by EU membership, but in fact the UK only joined the EU after we had realised that we had already lost Great Power status). India might be a latent Great Power but doesn't act like one. Germany and Japan have intentionally eschewed Great Power status. Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa are strategically irrelevant - the B and S in BRICS are there by diplomatic courtesy. The only other candidate as I see it is Turkey.
Nobody thinks Diplomacy is being played in Ukraine. The Biden administration think they are trying to talk sense into a nuclear toddler. The Europeans are passively choosing whether to contribute the the American strategy or not - it turns out that the British and French can't even give the Ukrainians missiles without American permission. The Russians think they are playing Twilight Struggle like the old times, but they are actually playing Panzer General, badly.
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