This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

Asked if they think World War Three will happen in the next five to 10 years, 41 per cent of Britons and Germans said it was likely to, according to a YouGov poll in May 2025. An even higher proportion of Americans, French, Spanish and Italians think that an international military conflict is fast approaching, comparable to that of 1939-45. Since then, the US-Iran war has made a wider conflict far more probable.

A large majority of the public in these five Western nations – between 57 and 73 per cent – say that the next world war will most likely be fought with nuclear weapons with terrible consequences for the civilian populations. In Britain, 28 per cent say the war would lead to the deaths of most people in the world, while a more optimistic 32 per cent say that the death-rate would be higher than the Second World War, but most people would survive. Opinion in the other four states polled was the same or even more gloomy.

Such apocalyptic public expectations are, for the most part, not shared by the political, military and media elite in Europe and the US. Possibly this is because they have not yet come to terms with the destruction of the old world order in the last five years following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Middle East wars which have erupted since 2023, and the re-election of Donald Trump as the all-powerful US president in 2024.

On the contrary, Western political and military leaders have been astonishingly cavalier about the prospect of war with Russia, which has a nuclear arsenal of an estimated 5,459 warheads, of which 1,718 are deployed. Displaying a strange insouciance about the prospect of a wider war in Europe in which these weapons might be used, European defence chiefs have shown no restraint in their jingoism.

“If our country wavers because it is not ready to lose its children,” warned the new French army chief of staff General Fabien Mandon at the end of last year, “then we are indeed at risk.” Hawkish Nato secretary general Mark Rutte echoed his belligerent words, predicting that Russia may attack Nato within five years, at which time “we must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great grandparents endured”. The public may well have a more acute sense of what World War Three might be like than politicians happy to beat the patriotic drum and generals salivating over potentially giant military budgets.

The real nuclear threat

I share the popular perception that the threat of a devastating nuclear conflict is much graver than it has ever been before. But I believe the reasons for this are markedly different from what is commonly imagined. The great majority of Western Europeans say they see Russia as the major threat (78-82 per cent), though this is less true of Americans (69 per cent). But after President Donald Trump’s threats to take over Canada and Greenland and his attack on Iran, a majority in Spain, France and Italy view the US as a major or moderate threat to the peace of continental Europe.

But it is in the Middle East we see most clearly a new and more dangerous........

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