From Beijing to Washington to Cuba, the old world order has collapsed. Is this the most dangerous moment since 1945? One man says yes, and the clock is ticking.

My guest on this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast is Peter Apps. As Reuters’s global defense commentator, he has spent two decades in the rooms and on the roads where history is actually made. His new book, The Next World War, puts the odds of major war within the next 10 years at 1 in 3.

He argues that the world is more dangerous right now than at any point since the end of World War Two. More dangerous, in fact, than the Cold War — because at least then we knew the rules.

Today there are no rules. The old order is gone, and what has replaced it is something most of us can barely bring ourselves to look at directly: a world of permanent polycrisis, where Ukraine grinds on against Russia, where Iran has absorbed an American and Israeli strike and survived, where China watches and waits, and where a new generation of weapons — drones, AI, hybrid attacks on the invisible infrastructure of modern life — has rewritten the rules of conflict faster than the great powers can absorb them.

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