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.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
