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- [00:00]
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- [02:19]
Conor Boyle
welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great Pines meet. I'm Head of Programming Conor Boyle. How close are we to a new world war. And in an era shaped by great power, rivalry and rapid technological change, what might trigger a wider confrontation? On today's episode, Peter Apps, global defense commentator at Reuters, joins Hannah Lucinda Smith, journalist and foreign correspondent, to discuss the themes of his new book, the Next World War, the new age of global conflict and the fight to stop it. Let's join our host now. Hannah Lucinda Smith, so Peter Apps, author
- [02:52]
of the Next World War, something that is being talked about a lot at the moment, a book that came out at a very opportune moment, I would say. Welcome to Intelligence Squared.
- [03:02]
Peter Apps
Thank you. It's great to be here.
- [03:03]
Conor Boyle
So your book does pretty much what it says on the tin. It looks at the potential for global conflict in the short to medium term future. And there are three kind of major arenas that you focus on. That's European, the Middle east and Asia Pacific. Which of those do you think is the most volatile arena currently and, and which one has the most potential to be the flashpoint that sparks a wider war?
- [03:27]
Peter Apps
So, I mean, it's a really, it's a really interesting way of phrasing the question. I mean, obviously in terms of the most kind of volatile and kinetic to use the sort of military euphemism for for things that are actually going on, it's got to be a sort of toss up between Europe and the Middle east because you've got a live war still taking place in Ukraine. And and you've got a live but quite unusual conflict taking place in the Middle east, but which is still involved thousands, possibly even more than 10,000 US strikes against Iranian targets, obviously gone on for more than two months, seen not just strikes on Iran and Israel, which we've kind of got used to, but also Iran hitting at the Gulf states, including places like Dubai, that was seen as pretty safe. In Europe, you've got obviously this slightly strange dynamic where you've got a hot war going on in Ukraine, but you've also got the kind of colder war but with hybrid characteristics between NATO nations and Russia, where Russia isn't willing to physically attack with military force NATO nations because that might start a major conflict and still seems quite worried about what the US Would do if it tried to sort of cross that threshold. But it's doing all kinds of other things in the hybrid domain and obviously in Ukraine. But I mean, if you're looking for the place where a major global war might start, I still think you're looking at the Asia Pacific. And in fact, paradoxically, the fact that no one is prepared to risk a war in although These haven't so far in particularly the South China Sea and around Taiwan, tells you how dangerous people believe that conflict would be if it started. So if you're looking for one flashpoint to set the world ablaze, it's probably still Taiwan. But that doesn't mean that Europe and the Middle east aren't doing really interesting and quite lethal and dangerous things in their own right at the same time.
- [05:08]
Conor Boyle
That's interesting. So it is a kind of Cold War logic there that the situation is so volatile in that Asia Pacific region that almost is a state of this kind of mutually assured destruction, and that kind of holds it in a. In a state of stability.
- [05:22]
Peter Apps
Well, I wouldn't say it's a state of stability because both sides are arming fast. So the. The thing about the Asia Pacific is that it would take one side, specifically China, because the United States is not going to try and start a war in the Indo Pacific. It would take China to make a deliberate decision to invade Taiwan to kickstart that conflict, not unlike Europe in the 1930s where it took Germany's deliberate decision to invade Poland or to trigger the conflict, or Belgium in the First World War. So as long as China holds back from that decision, and right now, it doesn't look like it believes its military is ready. Xi Jinping has just fired almost all of his generals, which is very rarely a sign of a country that believes it's entirely confident that its military is working properly. So it doesn't feel like they're ready there. And they also have another opportunity to achieve what they want without war, which is the Taiwan election in 2028, where the Chinese are clearly hoping that the Kuomintang, which is the Taiwanese political party now closest to China and the one that is most friendly to Xi Jinping, and they said it would invite him over on a visit if they won the next election. So the Chinese are going to be using military pressure and sort of diplomatic pressure and hoping the Kuomintang win that election so they can get away with finding a way of getting Taiwan back, absorbed within the mainland without firing a shot. Of course, if that doesn't happen, it may well not happen. Then the Chinese will be fully tooled up from 2029, at least. They certainly hope they will be. And then it comes down to whether those at the top in Beijing are ready to pull that trigger. And that is going to be one of the great sort of unknowables as we go through 2029 and into the2030s, because we'll also have a new US president at that point.
- [06:59]
Conor Boyle
Just looking back to those more volatile, as you put it, more kinetic regions in Europe and the Middle east, you look a bit at kind of brinkmanship and near misses that have happened in these theaters. And there's one in particular where you talk about a British jet that was nearly shot down over the Black Sea by Russia. It was almost a sort of slip of fate that that didn't happen. What do you think is the potential in those regions for a slip up, a mistake actually sparking something far wider and more serious?
- [07:28]
Peter Apps
I think it's probably pretty low for the simple reason that unless countries want big wars, they don't tend to start. You know, the First World War did not start until Germany invaded Belgium. The Second World War didn't start until Hit invaded Poland. If countries don't want wars, they're generally quite good at avoiding them. The Cold War is a good example. You know, there were various incidents at various points in the Cold War and they never ran out of, ran over the edge. There is a slightly different sort of danger which people sometimes talk about in terms of boiling the frog, which is where the idea is. And I'm not sure this is true and never tried it. But if you put a frog in boiling water and you boil it slowly, the frog doesn't jump out of the water because it doesn't realize it's chewing too hot until it's too hot and then it dies. And so the risk, I think somewhere particularly like Europe and we have arguably seen this in the Middle east over the last 20 years is as each things as escalation happens gradually over years and years and years that we've been in a 25 year, 40 year confrontation with Iran that gradually you get closer and closer to this devastating or at least damaging conflict that you weren't expecting or you were hoping to avoid and you end up getting, getting into it. I think actually the most interesting conflict of the last two years though is actually the Indo Pakistani four day war of 2025. So people remember that was May 2025. India and Pakistan fought a four day conflict. And that was interesting because they were both incredibly restrained in what they did while still killing each other's people. So their aircraft never left each other's airspace. So India's never penetrated Pakistani airspace with manned aircraft, nor vice versa, but they fired lots of missiles and drones at each other over a four day period before stepping back from the brink. And I think that is a particularly interesting form of conflict because that's the sort of Thing that could once, you've done that once or twice and you've seen this within the Middle East. The US and Iran fought a 10 day war last year that seems to have given the Americans the impression that they control escalation in a new conflict in 2026. And of course, as we've actually seen, they've ended up in a conflict that is still very controlled. I mean, the death toll is still remarkably low for a conflict that's raised across the Middle East. But it's also proving remarkably difficult to
- [09:35]
Conor Boyle
get out of looking at these more kind of almost peripheral conflicts. Like you mentioned India, Pakistan, you look at some others in your book as well. You look at Libya, you look at Ethiopia. Is there an interplay between those conflicts and the kind of broader, more regional conflicts? What you describe in some places as the axis of upheaval. This is, you know, powers like Russia, Iran, China, which are also almost coming together to form a kind of bloc against the worst.
- [10:04]
Peter Apps
Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt that most of those conflicts have a sort of axis of upheaval element to them. So it's sometimes very complicated. So for example, in Sudan, different elements of the Russian state, so the Russian government and the Wagner group, or one stage on different sides in that conflict. If you look at Myanmar, there's definitely a sort of slight sort of China versus sort of the US led bloc element there. On the other hand, there's also a new bunch of rising powers of which the United Arab Emirates is probably the biggest single example. Turkey, of course, another really, really big example of countries that are not trying to overturn the West. In fact, both Turkey and the UAE are quite happy with their, well, broadly happy with their relations with the west in general. But they want to. But then quantum gravity sort of tips the world and particularly their respective regions. So in the case of uae, that means the kind of Indian Ocean region. In the case of Turkey, it means the Middle east and into Central Asia into places where those countries national interests or those countries able to pursue their national interest, including by lethal military force or by delivering military supplies. So there is definitely a kind of overlap. I mean, you, you make an interesting question about how much these are tied together. I'm in Tampa, Florida at the moment. On the plane out, I was watching Nuremberg, the film about the Nuremberg trials. And one of the justifications from the Allies for holding those trials and indeed building the entire United nations system was this feeling in 1945 that national wars will turn into world wars. So at that point they would have definitely maintained that, you know, the invasion of Abyssinia by Italy, for example, in the mid-1930s was a precursor to the Second World War. And of course, if we do end up in a larger war, or if we end up in a period that is, you know, just short of war, which is also distinctly possible, then, you know, we, we might go back and say, yes, actually Syria was part of that, you know, going back as far as 2011, 12, 13, you know, maybe, maybe Sudan was part of that. If we stay short of a war, we'll look at it more at the Cold War and we'll say that these were just kind of proximate conflicts that never went over the edge. So, you know, one of the things that looking at the book is, you know, it is a first or second draft of history, but we don't know how that story ends yet. And you know, obviously what happens in the next 10 years is going to hugely shape our understanding of what is happening now and indeed the last decade and a half.
- [12:29]
Conor Boyle
I mean, yes, you talk a lot about sort of, you know, this gradual escalation and it does in some ways it feels like we've very quickly arrived at a point where we are talking about a risk of kind of a global conflict, or at least multiple regional conflicts. But if we look back, we can see the signs of those escalations coming quite a way off, some of them being sort of small skirmishes, the growth of this kind of axis of upheaval, also the growth, as you say, of more kind of middle powers like the UAE and Turkey. But one thing that you point out in the book, which really struck me, was that actually NATO's total defense spending is more than Russia's and China's combined. So why do you think that we kind of feel ourselves to be so under prepared or these are the kind of, you know, noises that we hear coming out of the west and out of NATO so much at the moment.
- [13:19]
Peter Apps
So I mean, I think firstly, military spending does not equal military capability. So, you know, the UK for example, spends 20% more on defense than Israel does. And in fact the UK makes up a fairly significant terms of NATO defense spending. In total, it's you been the largest spender in Europe for quite a large amount the last 25 years. And the UK, I think most people are increasingly coming to believe has been uniquely, you know, I don't want to say inept, but uniquely sort of ill judged in what it spent its money on, because actually it's bought about. It spent a lot of money buying about 2/3 of a capability, but not the last third to make it actually work properly. So you've got aircraft carriers and tanks and armored vehicles and so forth, but you're missing things like some of the countermeasures. You're missing something, you're missing a lot of ammunition. So actually you don't get that so much. Other countries, for example, Finland spends a fraction of what we do, but it's actually remarkably well prepared for a Russian attack on its territory. You know, Poland spending a lot more. Germany, I think it's going to spend twice as much in the next five years as it did in the last five. Very mixed picture. But again, on the ammunition, you know, threshold, I think that they're likely to be outpacing the U.S. i think, you know, Ukraine, for example, is already, you know, outpacing the US and things like small drones that it makes. And so, you know, there's a whole bunch of quite different dynamics in play there. I think the answer to your question as to why it's been so mixed is a mixture of threat protections. You know, if you are Finland, if you are Poland, if you are the Baltic States, then you know, war with Russia is something that happened within living memory. Occupation by Russia and all of those cases is something that happened within recent memory. I'm 44, so if I was a Pole, I would have grown up my first eight, nine years with Russian troops in the country, similar in the Baltic state. Whereas obviously the UK it's not just a long time since the Second World War, but actually the Second World War is seen as an aberration as we've only had, you know, nine years of, or slightly more than that of great power war over the last 130 years. Even if you include the Napoleonic wars, we're really only talking about sort of a couple of decades, over a couple of centuries. So we're not used to that existential threat. We're used to wars being things that we fight in place like Afghanistan. And I think we've been unusually slow to wake up to the threat that is now obviously it's, you know, different to what we thought it was. So, for example, it now seems if we did fight a three or four day war with Russia in Europe, or a ten day war or a five year war, it was mostly conventional. I would be incredibly surprised if London was not struck in the same way that Keeb or Lviv have been in Ukraine with intermediate range ballistic missiles, for example. And yet there is no conversation at all in the UK about the basic civil defense requirements to deal with you relatively light level of threat. You know, we're talking about probably a lower number of certainly less than the blitz or less than the V1, V2 offensive that hit London in 1944, 1945. Certainly something that the UK government readily prepare for. And you and meet the threat of both by building air defense and by building up civil defense. But there is an unwillingness to have that conversation. And I think if you look at some of the opinion polling in the UK in particular, actually ordinary people are very aware of this risk, but government is not prepared to have that conversation with them. And we also have this very interesting and slightly bizarre sort of conversation between the military and society where the military sort of says, well, ordinary people don't understand this, but more people must join the army because there's going to be a big war at which date lots of people in the military will die. Which is not a very good sort of recruitment strategy. And it's not a very sort of. What you need in saying is what some of the European states saying, we think we can avoid this war, but in order to avoid this war we have to do X, Y and Z. That may mean you need to pay more tax, it may mean you have to spend your tax pounds of dollars differently and it may mean that we have more people have to spend time in uniform. But that is not because we want to fight. It is because if we over prepare, then the fight will never come. And that seems to be a conversation that the UK not just political elite, but also kind of military and government structures are very unprepared to have for the British people.
- [17:26]
Conor Boyle
Why do you think that is? Do you think that is just because of our lack of, you know, living understanding of war? Is it because, you know, they, they don't think it's a particularly good time to be delivering more bad news?
- [17:39]
Peter Apps
No, if I'm honest, I think it's because I think this is true of lots of countries. But I think we saw this in the Brexit referendum. The British sort of civil service and political class are very out of touch with the actual British people think and they often don't notice. I remember meeting a Foreign Office mandarin who had only realized at the last minute what was about to happen with the Brexit referendum when his car broke down outside London and he realized that when he went to the garage, no one in the entire village that he'd stopped in was going to vote remain. So simultaneously, I think, you know, when I, when I appear on, you know, radio stations like LBC or I ask questions, people at the sun, or I just talk to people, you know, ordinary people. They're all very aware that the risk of war has increased. They don't have a massive confidence in Britain's generals. And actually, if you look at why they. That, you know, if they were to pick three examples out of thin air, they would say Afghanistan most recently and the First World War a long time ago, neither of which are, you know, British generals covered themselves in glory. And I think partly, partly, I think sort of reasons of ego and, And. And not quite being able to prepare to engage with that debate. I think those at the top of the British military do not like that conversation. They certainly don't like being compared to Jefferson, the First World War. And they don't particularly want to have a conversation about what we're on, Afghanistan. So I think I. I think the lack of confidence and willingness and awareness is actually on behalf of the establishment rather than ordinary people, because I think ordinary people are much more prepared to have that kind of discussion. And I mean, I was watching an old War Office song from the Second World War about sort of people joining the army and being conscripted about 1942, and one that says, well, I'm a bricklayer. I want to go back to being a bricklayer, and I don't care. I have to fight to get there. You know, I think there is an understanding because most families remember my grandparents served in the second war, my great grandparents in the first. None of them were going to volunteer for military service during the long years of peace. They wanted to get on, build families and raise children and all the stuff they did. But there was an awareness that sometimes you have to step up. And there's been. And I think one of the things that we are struggling with now is that the nuclear. The development of Nuclear weapons in 1945 changed that argument. And my grandfather was an officer's messenger in what is now Pakistan at the time, preparing to invade Japan. They all thought they were going to die. Then suddenly nuclear weapons were invented. And the sort of conversation over lunch was, well, that's the end of ordinary soldiery. And to an extent it was. But Ukraine has Ukraine. And in fact, the Korean War in 1951, 51, 52, restarted or showed that ordinary soldiering hadn't gone away. And by ordinary soldiering, I don't mean sort of wandering around the Kaiba Pass. I mean large numbers of people sitting in trenches fighting things out in India for the future of Europe or the world. And I think we know, look, if a new war come, going to feel more like the second and First World War than that apocalyptic nuclear exchange that we were expecting in the Cold War. So, you know, if. I don't even know if London has air rides, air raid sirens anymore, I suspect it would just be done through your mobile phone. But you know, if, if an air ride siren sounds in London in a year's time, I would be astounded if London was then annihilated with a nuclear warhead because we would then respond in kind to the Russians and the world would end. I would expect it to be the sort of thing you currently see. Overnight in Ukraine, siren would go off. You would hear 4, 5, 6, 7 large explosions, some of which might be closer than others. And then people would get up and go to work in the morning again. And it is not impossible to imagine an environment where we gradually escalate along those lines quite a long time. It's almost 1984, where sort of you, east, your Eurasia had always been at war with, with, with Oceania. You know, there is this risk that we move into an environment where the Indo Indians, Pakistanis found themselves, where sort of lobbing the occasional missile. Each other is fine these for a few days. We may even end up in a scenario where having lots of people fighting each other across no man's land, as in Ukraine, is, is a plausible option. I mean, I. One of the kind of intellectual games I occasionally played myself, although it's in no sense funny, is how long would it take me to explain to my great grandfather's platoon in the trenches in the First World War what is going on now? And the answer is not very long. And one of the reasons why it wouldn't take very long is because when they, when someone put their hands up and goes, well, what does war look like in the 2020s? We go, well, if you're in a trench, it looks exactly like this, except there is now netting over the top of the trench stop a drone flying in, to which they then will say, well, what's a drone? You go, well, you know what, you know, we've just invented aircraft. It turns out they've got smaller and that would be about it. So, you know, I think we will catch up with this. Obviously the Ukrainians are already there, but I think the British establishment and, and indeed the transatlantic jury establishment to a lesser extent is, is on a journey and it, it takes a while to catch up. Warning. The following ziprecruiter radio spot you are
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- [24:33]
Conor Boyle
I mean, coming at this question from the other way, yes, we're moving back to this situation where states are becoming principal actors in War, whereas 20 years ago we were talking about the age of non state actor warfare. But what's the responsibilities of citizens? You're a reservist, Peter. You've, you've decided to kind of sign up and do your bit. What, what should be the individual responsibilities? And how can, how can Western governments like the UK do more to persuade people to see perhaps national, a kind of national duty in, in doing some service?
- [25:10]
Peter Apps
Well, so I think the first thing is to realize that if terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism had been an existential threat after 9 11, we would have lost. You only have to look at things like say the vetting of Peter Mandelson. That is obviously a system where we're spending a lot of money on something that actually generates surprisingly little in the way of useful outcomes. So I think we have to accept that we got very lazy. My personal view. I mean honestly, a podcast about you, the future of liberalism. Well, if you happen to believe you haven't to be, broadly said, liberal with a small L that will only. A liberal society will only exist as long as enough people in it are prepared to defend it. And the more people are prepared to defend something, the less likely it is that individuals are going to have to do anything about it. You know, so if everyone. The truth is that if everyone in the UK performed National Service and if 1 or 2% of them spent a year garrisoning Estonia, then that alone would probably yield enough boots on the ground in Estonia to mean the Russians were going to come. Now, we seem to be really, really struggling to have that discussion. And I think there are various reasons for that. But, I mean, in the military, there's a saying, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, but real insiders talk career track. And the risk of stating the obvious, if you start funneling large chunks of your society through the military, you immediately erode the sense of control of the people who are used to running that military, particularly what you might call you office the class, those who rejoin, those who can keep on joining and keep on becoming officers and, and any the sort of groups that we get our generals from. You know, there would be a substantive change to that if we took people from across British society. And that always worries people at the top of any kind of environment. There is, I think, the feeling that. I think a lot of it's snobbery. You know, I think there is this feeling that, you know, and, and you see it. I'm in Tampa at the moment where, which home of U.S. special Operations Command, where there are a lot of, you know, very fit men and slightly few women who are in love with the idea of being a warrior elite. And that sort of comes with it, the assumption that the rest of society is a bit useless. I mean, the problem with the warrior elite is that it's not really enough to kind of operate in this kind of world. You can do things with the warrior elite. And in fact, the US is it. I mean, the US model for going to war or indeed preventing is probably going to remain, you know, a professional military and Special Forces deployed in places like Taiwan, East Europe, because If you deploy 15 US tanks and, you know, 60 special operations forces, someone like Estonia, the Russians may never come. Europe is not going to be able to adapt that approach to deterrence. Somebody's going to struggle to. So I think, you know, the European model for deterrence, certainly in mainland Europe, is going to look like Ukraine. So it's going to look like, you know, much larger, arguably less Skilled armies, but which are capable. But I mean, when we say less skilled, you know, if you actually look at a Ukrainian brigade, Ukraine struggles to do what we buy, Dallas maneuver, tying your full divisional level, sort of, you know, glorious military maneuvers across the. Across the plains. But each individual assault brigade is pretty sophisticated. They want. They're run by, you know, someone who's usually got their own kind of business and other connections. They usually buy their own drones, you know, and there are enough of them to hold the Russians back, you know, despite the Americans delivering less aid this year, despite the fact Ukraine's running out of people, they are holding that line for the last six months or so. And that may be where Europe ends up. Having said that, depends on where your threat horizon is. Yeah, if the Russians come this year, that might be a bit dodgy. Of course, they also play down Ukraine.
- [29:16]
Conor Boyle
So your book came out in January this year, and at the time in the book, you put the risk of global war at 30 to 35%. Obviously, it does feel like a long time since January. Now, a lot of events have transpired since then. Would you say that that calculation has changed?
- [29:33]
Peter Apps
No, I would say over the next 10 years, it's about the same. And I would also say that certainly for my case, I am more worried about the era after 2029 than I am about the current era. I don't think a global war is going to erupt during the Trump administration. I think there's going to be lots of stuff going on. I think the world is very much being contested. I mean, one of the phrases that I've come up with is this is not a world war, but it's a battle for the world. And you can see lots of nations, Turkey, Japan, the Saudis, the Chinese, obviously, all looking at what the US Is doing, seeing a bunch of opportunities and going forward. Having said that, I would be very surprised if walk into Europe in the next three years. My worries start to go up pretty dramatically, starting with 2029. A new U.S. president, maybe J.D. vaughn, maybe a left winger we've never heard of. Either way, if you look what happened in 2021, no sooner had Biden come into office, Vladimir Putin mobilized 110,000 troops on the borders. Right. I would be incredibly unsurprised if the Russians and Chinese did not do that simultaneously when the new US post comes into office in 2029. So we could easily see mass Chinese mobilization to intimidate Taiwan, particularly if Taiwan has not voted common Tang at its elections the previous year. It's going to be an election year in both Germany and Britain in 2029. So that makes it really hard to send more troops forward to Estonia or Lithuania. In the case of the German, France maybe weren't run by the far right by that point. Yeah, it also may not be, I think and Vladimir Putin and shoes will be older. So I think, you know, I would say that still on a chance of 1 in 3, but if you're looking for the periods I'm worried about, I would say 2029 to 202035 is probably my period instead of equality. If we get through to 2035 in one piece, then I think we will have sort of stabilized at a higher level of tension. You know, I wouldn't be. If we get 2035 in one piece, then I wouldn't be surprised if we get 2045 in one piece, you know, and 55 maybe you reckon a sort of Cold War balance or whatever. But I think, I think that we're all assessing every problem. But actually I think we understand what this president looks like. We do not understand what the next president looks like. And for me, that is the one that I would sleep over.
- [32:02]
Conor Boyle
Peter Apps, some stark warnings and a brilliant book that you've written, the Next World War. Thank you very much for joining Intelligence Squared.
- [32:12]
Peter Apps
Thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure.
- [32:14]
Conor Boyle
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Margarita Volpatto and was edited by Mark Roberts. For our free episodes and full length recordings, become a member@intelligencesquared.com SL membership and to join us live in person at our future events, head to intelligence squared.com attend to see our full program. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
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- [33:04]
Conor Boyle
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- [33:07]
Quince Brand Spokesperson
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- [33:13]
ZipRecruiter Spokesperson
Lose more@weightwatchers.com at six months, participants in the clinical trial of Weight Watchers program lost an average of £12.