It’s a brave man who makes predictions of future war in the age of Donald Trump. Since the manuscript of The Next World War was handed in last autumn, the US president had added Venezuela to his list of snatched military victories. And despite a barrage of criticism Trump still says he wants Greenland, although he seems to rule out using force against the Greenlanders. Anxious Nato members talk openly about a ruptured alliance. As the book was written and re-written largely in 2025, Peter Apps and his editors at Wildfire must have wished that he had turned out a book on fly-fishing or mini-golf.
War-scare literature, of course, has a long history. In the decades before the First World War fictionalised projections of the coming showdown fed into the public and military debate, imagined surprise invasions and nudged complacent readers into thinking about national vulnerability. The best in the genre grasped the importance of mobilisation, and had a sense that the world was heading for industrialised slaughter. The Cold War scare-lit substituted rapacious Russians for the Hun and the books were often clunkily written by retired generals. Richard Shirreff’s 2016 warning 2017: War with Russia, got the timing wrong, but served its purpose as a wake-up call.
Apps, a Reuters columnist who also presents the Facing Coming Storms podcast for a British army think tank, has steered clear of fiction or moralising. He offers instead a narrative weave that links existing and future flashpoints — Ukraine, a smattering of Gaza, the prospect of a showdown in Taiwan — and ends up sharing the wisdom of a US Naval War College instructor: “Our growing problem is simultaneity — so many things happening all at once.”
That, clearly, will be the central feature of a world war — information overload as conflicts pile up and the speed of conflict hots up, driven by new tech. Apps’s self-appointed task is to ask the question: what comes next? Does China draw the lesson from Russia’s four-year slogging war against Ukraine that Taiwan will be impossible to grab? Or that China can get away with it if the US president is sufficiently distracted?
One of the author’s most interesting visits is to Narva, home to a large Russian minority in Estonia. His working assumption: that when some kind of lasting ceasefire is reached between Moscow and Kyiv, Vladimir Putin may turn to more direct testing of Nato’s eastern front. How difficult would it be for the Russian intelligence forces to stir up the ethnic Russians in Estonia, fabricate a conflict and present itself as a self-appointed peacekeeping force on behalf of its Slav cousins? Not exactly an invasion, but an act of disruption that could drive a wedge into the Nato alliance.
In mid-February 2024, Apps writes, Trump told a roaring crowd at a campaign rally in South Carolina that “when in office he told an unnamed European leader he would ‘encourage’ Russia to do ‘whatever the hell they want’ against Nato countries” who were not paying their dues. Unhelpful, says the head of Estonian intelligence. And no wonder: Trump was already in effect inviting Putin to challenge those Nato members whom the American leader branded as freeloaders.
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Apps emphasises that he is neither pro- nor anti-Trump. He largely buys the president’s argument that his unpredictable behaviour helps to deter Putin and Xi Jinping. Fair enough, but the approach robs Apps of a narrative thread. For example, who exactly is Trump deterring when he says he wants ownership of Greenland? Is he telling China and Russia that their quest for control of the Arctic waterways should stop as soon as it encroaches on territory close to North America? Or that the US cannot be ignored as an Arctic player? Or that he has no great respect for the sovereign statehood of his European allies?
The book draws less on the author’s personal reporting and relies more on a detailed sifting through the Trump foreign policy file — and when Trump zigzags, so does the book. “If real-time journalism is the first draft of history,” Apps writes, grasping at the most basic of clichés, “this [book] is perhaps at best a second, written in the moment and rewritten several times as events and trends have shifted.”
This becomes a problem because Apps is afraid to make the judgment calls that should be the skeleton of his book. If Russia and Ukraine reach a settlement, Kyiv will want solid security guarantees to ensure the Russians do not come back for more. Trump has, however, devalued any kind of western back-up for Volodymyr Zelensky. Indeed, Trump, like Putin, seems keen to shuffle the Ukrainian leader off the stage. A security guarantee might then have to come in a different form — in long-range weapons supplied for use against Russian economic targets should the Russians return to the battlefield. Apps does not take a position on this or whether this raises the risk of a world war. He seems strangely anxious about advancing opinions that might be deemed controversial.
The Narva Museum in Estonia
JANIS LAIZANS/REUTERS
How likely, Apps is asked, is a new, major war? “My personal belief is that the risk stands at around 30 to 35 per cent over the coming decade.” There is no clue offered as to how this risk is calculated; it is a pointless statement. All he is certain of is that if the allies do not stick together the odds will worsen. Apps, of course, completed his book under time pressure; he was racing against Trump’s very own Doomsday clock. But Charles Dickens wrote under time constraints too. So did Ernest Hemingway who in his 1935 essay Notes on the Next War wrote: “Not this August, nor this September… Not next August, nor next September; that it is still too soon… But the year after that or the year after that, they fight… and then what happens to you?”
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Apps quotes this admiringly, and so he should. If he could summon even a sliver of that elegance, he could have carried his readers to the end of a book that contrives to be both ponderously worthy and slapdash. Spoiler alert, here is his prediction of the future: “It is increasingly undeniable that a serious battle for the future of the world is already underway.”
Ugh! This is a book that, if it had lived up to its promise, would have kept you awake at night. Instead it should be on prescription for insomniacs everywhere.
The Next World War: The New Age of Global Conflict and the Fight to Stop It by Peter Apps (Wildfire £25 pp464). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members