War Is Interested in You by Gideon Rachman review – are we on the brink of world war three?

Are we on the brink of a new world war? This bleak subject is increasingly invoked by leaders, soldiers and officials, from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin to the heads of our military and intelligence services. It’s an urgent theme, then, for the FT foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman to explore in his latest survey of global diplomacy. Rachman draws his title from the expression, sometimes attributed to Trotsky: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you” – the idea being that conflict doesn’t much care whether we like to think about it or not: it will come knocking on our doors regardless.

Clearly, humanity is in a particularly unsafe spot right now, but seeing our security issues laid out like this, catalogued and mapped and analysed, they seem almost overwhelming. To summarise: the most powerful, nuclear-armed states – the US, China and Russia – are led by unscrupulous, self-dealing “strongmen”, each of whom is playing with the nationalist “Great Again” politics epitomised by Trump. Democracy is being rolled back around the world, and even bastions of liberalism such as the UK, France and Germany seem vulnerable to takeover by the Putin-friendly far right. The so-called rules-based international order and its institutions – the UN, the WTO, Nato – are being deliberately undermined by the aforementioned strongmen, and are as weak now as they have ever been.

Putin has described the new world order with the term “might makes right”, and the result is that conflicts have been breaking out at a rate unprecedented in the postwar era. According to Rachman, there were 61 in 2024 alone, and 11 full-blown wars. This included Gaza as well as some conflicts far less visible in the west, such as the one in Sudan, which by mid-2025 had led to 150,000 battlefield deaths. In 2026 many “state-based conflicts” are ongoing, including the largest land war in Europe since 1945 (in Ukraine) and the most disruptive in the Middle East for more than 20 years (Iran). Although these are mostly confined to their regions, they have begun to overlap and spread, as Russia deploys North Korean troops and tests Nato’s resolve, Iran throttles global shipping, and Ukraine advises Gulf states on drone use. And even as these grind on, others threaten to explode, including between India and Pakistan, North and South Korea, and China and Taiwan.

Of these potential flashpoints, it is Taiwan that may offer the fastest route to a world war, since it could bring China and the US into direct conflict. For decades, Taiwan’s security was guaranteed by US naval superiority; now Beijing, after a massive military buildup, has more warships than Washington. It’s said that the single Chinese shipyard on Changxing Island has more capacity than all US yards combined. Still, Xi Jinping knows that if the US comes to Taiwan’s aid, the result would be a bloodbath, which is why US presidents have mostly been keen to emphasise the US’s commitment to Taiwan. But Trump has been far more ambivalent – declaring in May this year, for instance, that “I think the last thing we need right now is a war that’s 9,500 miles away” – which only increases the risk of China attempting an assault.

It’s here, in the shifting power balance between China and the US, that the root of the new global insecurity lies. Whatever you think of American hegemony, the US maintained a sort of stability, after the cold war, in which victims could plausibly appeal to international law. The 2003 invasion of Iraq destroyed that system, and US failure there and in Afghanistan persuaded future presidents against intervention. Three times, between 2012 and 2015, Obama chose not to step in to address illegal acts by the Assad regime, Russia and China, which signalled an American retrenchment. The Trump administration has taken this further, reverting to the kind of isolationist, tariff-based protectionism that postwar institutions such as the UN security council and WTO were built to avoid. It’s hard not to spot echoes here of the 1930s – the time, incidentally, when the slogan “America first” was popularised.

How to offset these risks? Rachman surveys a handful of mechanisms that have helped maintain the peace, and finds them wanting. The rules-based international order, for instance, barely functioned in its heyday; now, as Mark Carney put it plainly, it “no longer works”: we are living through a “rupture”. What about spreading democracy and economic stability as a path to peace – a principle exemplified by the “Golden Arches” theory, which states that no two nations with McDonald’s will wage war on each other? There’s no comfort here either, as that was proved wrong in the 1990s, and the number of democracies has been declining steadily since 2006. Then there’s deterrence, which still by and large keeps us safe. But it hasn’t stopped fighting between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, and China and North Korea are rapidly expanding their atomic arsenals.

What we’re left with, then, as American primacy declines, is a global version of Trump’s “Donroe doctrine”, in which each major power gets a “sphere of influence” where they call the shots. In this scenario, Washington rules over the Americas, Beijing over east Asia, and Moscow the old Soviet zone. Clashes are sorted out by one-to-one conversations between authoritarian leaders. But what if these rulers fall out? And anyway, who wants to live in the shadow of an overbearing neighbour?

While the outlook of War Is Interested in You is undoubtedly gloomy, Rachman’s book is not. His writing is engaging and anecdotal, and he brings vast experience to bear on a vital subject. He won’t go so far as to say a new world war is inevitable, but the threat is becoming impossible to ignore.

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