Not terribly close. Before the Great War you had two clusters of alliances bound together by mutual assistance treaties. They were not really like NATO today, because the treaties were largely State-to-State, rather than State-to-Organization. So Russia had a treaty with Slavic Serbia, while Germany had a treaty with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Russia in turn had a treaty with France, and France with Britain.
A second difference is that war relied on vast, non-standing conscript armies. Going to war required mobilizing/calling-up thousands or millions of guys with day jobs, who would proceed to their units, take up weapons and be ready to fight. This mobilization process took weeks. As mobilization proceeded, the disposition of your armies, and hence your grand strategy, would be revealed. So this was a one-way process. Once you started to mobilize, you were going to war. Once a rival began to mobilize, you had no choice but to do the same.
So Archduke FF was assassinated, A-H went to war with Serbia, Russia went to war with A-H, Germany with Russia, France with Germany, Britain alongside France. All because of one assassin’s bullet.
The powers at the time expected a fast war. “Home before the leaves fall.” (The war started in August 1914.)
Today armies are largely professional, fast-moving, hard-hitting, highly dependent on over-the-horizon weapons. No more weeks-long mass mobilizations. Also, the possibility of escalation to nuclear weapons raises the stakes.
The closest parallel to what began WWI would be a Russian attack on the Baltic republics, which are NATO members, thus requiring most of Europe and the U.S. to go to war with Russia in response.
Would a Trump-led U.S. fulfill its NATO obligations? Might Putin suspect we would not? From this possible miscalculation a European war could arise, with ultimate consequences impossible to predict.
BTW, the closer historical parallel would be World War II.
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