This is 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 world order – or disorder – emerging, one in which the possession and use of nuclear weapons are far more attractive to countries than in the past. Put simply, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Arab oil states of the Gulf, who once relied on the US to defend them against Iran and Israel, have realised since the US-Israel attack on Iran on 28 February that Washington is no longer willing or able to do either.
Trump justifies his Iran war – its exact purpose keeps changing – by claiming that it was essential to prevent Iran developing a nuclear weapon. But he has paradoxically accelerated a shift regionally towards acquiring nuclear weapons as the only true insurance policy against foreign interference or attack. Every government knows that impoverished nuclear-armed North Korea is better able to defend its sovereignty than highly developed Canada or vastly wealthy Saudi Arabia. Not all those states who dream of possessing a nuclear weapon will get one, but the motivation and potential benefits for having a nuclear deterrent have soared in the last few years.
A weakened America
Trump’s America is seen as untrustworthy and unreliable, as has been the case since the first Trump presidency in 2017. But it is the Iran war which revealed that it is also weaker than the rest of the world had suspected. An air campaign in which the US and Israel targeted Iran with over 20,000 bombs and missiles failed to win a military victory. “Beware of small states,” wrote the 19th century Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, the reason being that small states fight hard because their very existence is in peril, and their very puniness as an opponent makes failure to defeat them decisively more humiliating for a great power. “The US may have been a bully [when it came to dealing with other states], but we were quite an effective bully,” says the anti-Trump neo-conservative Bill Kristol in an interview on the podcast. “But now we look like a weak bully.”
This is more than a matter of perception. The US was demonstrably blind-sided in the first days of the war by the strategic consequences of Iran having become a drone super-power, though this should not have been a surprise, since Iran briefly crippled the Saudi oil industry by a drone and guided missile attack deep within the kingdom in 2019. It is not that America’s great armada of ships and planes is totally ineffective, but they cannot strike Iran with impunity or defend its allies throughout the region. The US may not rebuild its wrecked bases in the Gulf. It has launched “Operation Economic Outcast” to crush Iran by imposing economic sanctions on all who do business with Iran, but it dare not sanction Chinese banks who buy US Treasury bonds.
Armed force only
Fear of Israel is the other key reason why Middle East states are seeking to acquire their own nuclear bomb or establish a close alliance with a country that does. In August, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and nuclear-armed Pakistan formed a Nato style mutual defence pact. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has shown that it will only deal with neighbouring countries through armed force. It is routinely bombarding Gaza, Lebanon and Syria right up the Turkish border. It openly conducts what the UN has described as a campaign of ethnic cleansing against three million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Its far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir this week set out a plan for the expulsion of two million Palestinians from Gaza, starting with 250,000 in the first year. Some 1,300 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in the enclave since the so-called Gaza ceasefire last October.
Trump angrily denounced a reporter at a press conference earlier this week for asking if he would use nuclear weapons against Iran, saying it was “a stupid question”. This might be true of the US for the moment, but countries in the region do not believe the same applies to Israel, which has at least 90 nuclear devices according to the Arms Control Association. The risk is growing by the day that future wars will be nuclear.
Further thoughts
The timing of Sir Keir Starmer’s announcement that he is stepping down as an MP on the same day as Andy Burnham spoke for the first time as Prime Minister in the House of Commons was in keeping with his well-established reputation for political ineptitude. Many wondered if they were witnessing a mean-spirited bid to divert attention from Burnham’s speech or the latest example of the former prime minister’s ham-fistedness.
Yet, Starmer’s personal failings as prime minister – poor judgement, inarticulacy, inauthenticity – divert attention away from the more interesting question of how a person so ill-equipped for the job should have risen so far and so fast. A sympathetic interpretation of his career might conclude that he was but one more addition to the body count of British prime ministers who failed to cope with the deep-seated problems facing Britain since the financial crisis of 2008. These hit a country already weakened by the legacy of Thatcherism, whose battered chickens – privatisation, outsourcing, de-industrialisation and over-centralisation – are coming home to roost.
This explanation largely lets Starmer off the hook by grouping him with his five discredited predecessors, but is too kind. After all, he had presented himself two years ago as an unexciting but competent leader, so different from the craziness of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Polls showed that, from the start, the British public never quite bought this benign picture of a plodding but reliable Starmer, and they have turned out to be dead right. Within a few months of taking office, he had shown himself to be serially unreliable and untrustworthy when it came to people and policy. His constant U-turns became something of a national joke, revealing a man powered by ruthless ambition but lacking fixed beliefs or loyalties. He became staggeringly unpopular.
Starting as a radical left-wing human rights lawyer, he became head of the Crown Prosecution Service in 2008 under Labour, but made himself acceptable to the Tories, whom his biographer Tom Baldwin says would have reappointed him in 2013 if he had not stepped down before becoming an MP in 2015. He served in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, succeeding him as Labour leader in 2020 and promising to pursue a similar agenda. Turning on Corbyn, he purged the left of the party, becoming a right-wing factional leader and eventually leading to the mass defection of Labour voters to the Greens.
Much of the commentariat gave Starmer a free pass on his purge of the left, but then discovered that he showed equal brutality in ousting senior figures such as Sue Gray, his chief of staff, and Olly Robbins, the head of the Foreign Office. Routinely blaming others for his own errors, his rapidly diminishing band of defenders explained away his faults by truthfully suggesting that he was not a natural politician, but it then turned out that he was equally incompetent as an administrator.
Starmer’s career may not be over. His greatest successes have been as a self-promoter, persuading people to give him top jobs despite his previous lack of achievement. This is what the Americans call “failing upwards”. In many respects, this strange man was as weird as any of his predecessors in Downing Street.
Beneath the radar
“Net migration” is an irritating and deceptive – primarily self-deceptive – statistic used by the British government and media as if this were the key figure revealing the ups and downs of immigration. In practice, it is a verbal sleight of hand to mask what is really happening to this central political issue, which has always left me confused and uneasy, because net migration is not immigration but immigration minus emigration. So a flood of British doctors and highly educated graduates taking up well-paid jobs in Australia and New Zealand gives a false impression that the immigration issue – which has so dominated UK politics for a decade – is on its way to being resolved.
Many decent people hearing the BBC announce that “UK migration drops to 171,000 – almost half of 2024’s figure” probably hoped that this was true. One in the eye for Reform and Restore. But this is self-deception, as Professor Jonathan Portes lucidly explains in an article in the UK in a Changing Europe. He says that his disagreement “is not a technical quibble”.
“The latest figures make the point. Net migration has indeed fallen sharply: from a peak of 944,000 in the year to March 2023 to 171,000 in the year to December 2025. But this conceals large movements in both directions. The ONS [Office for National Statistics] estimates that net migration of British nationals was minus 136,000, and net migration of EU+ nationals was minus 42,000, while non-EU+ net migration remained positive at about 350,000.
So, net migration is doing a lot of work here – arguably too much. If the concern is population growth, it is a reasonable, though incomplete, indicator. If the concern is “control”, it is less useful. And if the concern is that British people are leaving while non-white migrants are arriving, it is the wrong measure altogether.”
Cockburn’s picks
Israel is systematically driving Palestinians from their homes and land across the occupied West Bank. It is what the former correspondent Daniel Williams perceptively calls “The Middle East’s Orphan War” in his newsletter. After a visit to the area, he describes how “Israel is methodically emptying the West Bank countryside of hamlets and farms to either spur Palestinians to move into cities hemmed in by Israeli settlements, ramshackle ‘outposts’ and military bases, or flee into exile”.
“Spearheading the project are civilian militants known as Hilltop Youth who inhabit pop-up encampments known as ‘outposts’ throughout the West Bank. The camps are constructed close to Palestinian towns and rural homesteads targeted for harassment. The settlers, backed by the Israeli army, employ a broad menu of intimidation: physical violence, destruction of homes, barns and corrals, theft or slaughter of farm animals, incineration of wheat fields and sabotage of piped-in water supplies.”
Western governments complain and are ignored by Israel, which continues relentlessly creating “facts on the ground” i.e. settlements and outposts, putting an end to any prospect of territorial compromise between Israel and the Palestinians.