Certainly not every people spoke the language of conquest. The high mountain ranges of the world are populated by peoples who escaped the conquering activity of their neighbors by moving upsteam into less and less easily cultivable terrain, land no one else wanted.

You're right, of course, but the post-War consensus in which (most) major powers (mostly) acknowledged international law and (mostly) restricted themselves to economic, rather than military, competition was... nice. It took the two most destructive wars in history, back-to-back, to reach that state of (imperfect, relative) peace, and I'm sorry to see it ending.