To many Europeans and Americans, a global war no longer feels like a remote prospect.
Trump restores ‘Department of War’ as Defense Dept. secondary title
President Donald Trump signed an executive order allowing Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth to use “Department of War” as a secondary name for the Pentagon.
Early this fall, Germany’s leader Friedrich Merz assured a group of reporters in Duesseldorf that his country was “not at war.”
Merz was speaking about what he characterized as Russia’s repeated attempts to undermine European unity over its response to Moscow’s war in Ukraine. “But we are no longer at peace either,” he added.
Germany’s chancellor did not mention World War III or even imply it would soon be underway. But he did tap into a growing sense of apprehension among some Europeans and Americans: surveys show that many of them no longer view a global war as a remote prospect and believe it could occur in the next five to ten years.
Robert Muggah, the founder of SecDev, an Ottawa, Canada-based security and intelligence think tank, said that there is no shortage of signals and overlapping crises to point to that, to a degree, suggest there already is a “global war being fought across multiple domains without ever being formally announced.”
Airports in Denmark and Poland have been paralyzed by drones, cyber-attacks and other forms of sabotage. “Little green men” − the same Russian military forces in unmarked uniforms who seized Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014 − have recently been spotted near an Estonian border crossing with Russia. There are intensifying Chinese military exercises around Taiwan, which Beijing has vowed to unite, eventually, with mainland China.
The United States has struck suspected drug boats in waters off Venezuela that stretch the limits of legality. President Donald Trump is also considering land strikes on Venezuela to halt the flow of drugs. North Korea has dispatched troops to Ukraine, while Iran has supplied drones. A few short months ago, the U.S. bombed Tehran’s nuclear sites as part of a 12-day war between Iran and Israel. The White House has engineered the first steps of a Gaza ceasefire plan. Will it hold? Rippling beneath calm between India and Pakistan are two nuclear-armed neighbors whose relationship is rarely far from taking a dangerous turn.
“From the Baltics to the Taiwan Strait, governments are aggressively rearming, refurbishing bunkers, and quietly preparing their citizens for the worst,” said Muggah, whose own forecasting models show that global conflict, including the “unthinkable nuclear variety,” is a growing risk and that the “language of crisis is now mainstream.”
How likely is a new global war?
Trump has responded and contributed to these escalating threats in different ways.
He campaigned on promises to end conflicts and avoid new, “endless” wars. Since taking up his second presidency, Trump claimed he ended at least half a dozen wars from Armenia to Rwanda, though many outside experts, analysts and fact checkers have questioned the true scope and impact of his interventions, even if he’s made concrete progress in the Middle East by helping to broker a Gaza ceasefire and hostage exchange.
Trump has also announced plans to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Budapest to work on an agreement to end Russia’s war in Ukraine. The timing of any such meeting remains unclear.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the White House on Oct. 17 as the United States weighs supplying Ukraine with long-range Tomahawk missiles.
Trump has also sought, pending congressional approval, to rebrand the U.S. Department of Defense as the Department of War, the name used from 1789 to 1947, a period during which U.S. troops fought in seven wars and conflicts. Trump has said the rebranding reflects the United States’ “unbelievable history of victory” in previous world wars, but the name change carries symbolic semantic weight, and Trump’s chief warrior, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, has put it somewhat differently.
“We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct,” Hegseth said in the Oval Office on Sept. 5 when announcing the renaming intent. “We’re going to raise up warriors, not just defenders. So this war department, Mr. President, just like America, is back.”
Could nuclear weapons be used in the next war?
But it’s not just language. It’s also concrete actions and data that are adding to a sense of disquiet.
Trump has ordered two nuclear submarines to be positioned in “the appropriate regions” in response to Russian nuclear saber-rattling connected to the war in Ukraine. A trio of U.S. Air Force B-52 bombers − call signs BUNNY01, BUNNY02 and BUNNY03 − have been spotted on flight trackers flying near Venezuelan airspace in recent days. These bombers are capable of carrying nuclear or conventional weapons.
Trump has expressed many times his desire to take control of Greenland from Denmark, by force if necessary.
EU countries have five years to prepare for war, according to a military plan presented by the European Commission on Oct. 16. The plan is a reaction to Putin’s war on Ukraine and Trump’s unclear commitment to European security.
According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, based at Uppsala University in Sweden, the number of worldwide state-based armed conflicts rose from 59 to 61 in 2024, the latest year for which data are available.
Those figures mark the second consecutive year in which the UCDP recorded a historically high number of conflicts. The number of wars, defined as an armed state-based conflict that results in at least 1,000 direct battle-related deaths in a calendar year, increased from nine to 11, the highest count since 2016. In 2025, ten conflicts have already surpassed the 1,000 threshold. There might be more before the end of the year.
Therese Pettersson is a senior analyst at the UCDP. She said that while the number of state-based armed conflicts and wars has effectively doubled over the last 15 years, one of the reasons people may be getting the sense, rightly or wrongly, that the world is inching toward a global war is because “the rules-based order is not really functioning anymore.” She said, for example, that “border conflicts that used to be dealt with diplomatically or solved through negotiations are now quickly escalating to fighting.”
But Pettersson said there aren’t any “real signs that conflicts are becoming increasingly global in scale.”
Why is Ukraine a major risk?
Still, Muggah, from the Canadian think tank, notes that Russia’s war in Ukraine is probably the most obvious flashpoint for wider conflict escalation that draws in other countries.
He said that Ukraine’s battlefield has “settled into attritional stalemate,” but that is deceptive.
Russia has stepped up cross-border strikes, targeted energy grids and is testing NATO airspace across Europe in a manner where each such action “risks a clash that could expand horizontally.”
Prediction markets such as Polymarket appear to agree.
Polymarket forecasts a 5% chance that Russia will invade a NATO country, rising to 11% by June 2026, and estimates an 18% risk of a direct military clash between Russia and NATO forces before the end of 2025.
Russia also has a view on this.
Moscow’s top diplomat has accused NATO and the European Union of using Ukraine to wage war against his country. In a speech on the sidelines of the United Nations meetings in late September, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that both the military alliance and political bloc had “declared a real war” on Russia.
Trump has done the opposite and declared that a new world war won’t happen on his watch.
“This is something that’s taken off like a rocket ship, and it did from the beginning. And I’ve heard for years this is the biggest deal, long before I ran for office, that the Middle East, it’s the biggest, most complicated deal,” Trump said on Oct. 13 in Egypt as he signed the Gaza ceasefire plan alongside world leaders.
“Also, it’s the place that could lead to tremendous problems like World War III. They always talk about World War III would start in the Middle East, and that’s not going to happen. We don’t want it to start anywhere, actually.”