Our enemies are prepared for the fight. It’s time to rearm to avoid World War Three.
Last week, without apparent co-ordination, politicians and commentators around the world began to talk of an imminent global conflagration.
Donald Trump asserted that we were “on the brink of World War Three”. Volodymyr Zelensky said that Putin was preparing to attack Nato, and “that certainly means the Third World War”. Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of Russia Today, declared that World War Three will happen without fail, and it will happen “in the near future”.
Our own Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, was ahead of the curve. Two weeks ago, he averred that we had moved “from a postwar world to a prewar world”. Not long afterwards, the Chief of the General Staff, Gen Sir Patrick Sanders, warned that our army had been so reduced that when the war eventually came, we were in no position to win it.
This last intervention is by far the most alarming. Sir Patrick is not just another general lobbying for a bigger defence budget. The craggy-faced former Green Jacket has been eerily accurate in his predictions to date, not least about the outbreak and course of the Ukraine war.
What do these politicians and soldiers know that the rest of us don’t? How have we moved so quickly from complacency to despair, from world war being almost unthinkable to defeat seeming almost inevitable?
Part of the answer is that public discourse has caught up very suddenly with what historians and geostrategists have been saying for years, namely that the shift from a unipolar world is inescapably dangerous. It was in 2017 that the Harvard academic Graham Allison wrote Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? DT.
We could be on the brink of global conflict. We need to get serious if we are to have any chance of defending ourselves