Is Europe Drifting Towards a Third World War?
By Matthew Parish
Sunday 20 September 2026
There is something profoundly uncomfortable about Europe in the autumn of 2026. It is not simply that there is a major war underway on the continent, because that has already been true for several years. Nor is it merely that Russia has descended into an increasingly totalitarian form of government, that the United States appears progressively less interested in assuming responsibility for European security or that nationalist parties of various kinds are gaining strength across France, Germany and elsewhere. It is the conjunction of these things, together with the gradual disappearance of the habits of restraint that characterised European statecraft after 1945, that creates the unsettling impression of a continent beginning to lose control of its own history.
The expression ‘Third World War’ is easily abused. Virtually every substantial international crisis since 1945 has produced newspaper headlines warning that global conflict might be imminent, from the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Yom Kippur War to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the wars accompanying the collapse of Yugoslavia. Nuclear deterrence has repeatedly proved remarkably effective at preventing direct warfare between the great powers, and there is no reason to suppose that another European war is inevitable merely because the international atmosphere has become unusually unpleasant. Nevertheless there comes a point at which repeatedly insisting that catastrophe is unlikely becomes a substitute for examining the conditions under which catastrophe becomes possible.
Those conditions are becoming easier to identify. The stabilising assumptions upon which the post-war European security order depended are weakening simultaneously. The United States remains a member of NATO and maintains substantial military forces in Europe, but Europeans can no longer comfortably assume that Washington will indefinitely organise the defence of the continent on their behalf. American strategic attention is increasingly divided between Europe, China and the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East and a domestic electorate that has become markedly less enthusiastic about carrying indefinite overseas burdens. The issue is not necessarily American isolationism. It is that the United States has other priorities, and Europeans are gradually discovering that they must contemplate defending themselves.
For eighty years, western Europeans enjoyed the extraordinary luxury of conducting politics without having to think very seriously about the possibility of continental war. The United States provided the ultimate military guarantee, NATO institutionalised it and American nuclear weapons rendered a Soviet, and subsequently Russian, attack upon western Europe prohibitively dangerous. Europeans could argue about agricultural subsidies, migration quotas, environmental regulations, fiscal rules and constitutional niceties because somebody else was ultimately guarding the door. That arrangement permitted Europe to become prosperous, liberal and peaceful, but it also allowed Europeans to forget that peace is not a natural condition of international relations.
Britain occupies a particularly strange position in the European order now emerging. She is outside the European Union but remains one of Europe’s two nuclear powers, one of its most capable military states and one of the strongest European supporters of Ukraine. She possesses sophisticated intelligence services, expeditionary military capabilities, nuclear weapons and an unusually global diplomatic network. Yet Brexit has left Britain institutionally detached from the principal political machinery of the continent whose security remains inseparable from her own.
This position has echoes throughout British history. Britain is once again offshore, heavily armed and suspicious of developments upon the continent, seeking coalitions capable of containing whichever continental power appears most threatening to the European equilibrium. Yet the comparison with earlier centuries has severe limitations. The Royal Navy no longer dominates the oceans, Britain no longer possesses an empire providing enormous strategic depth and the country does not have the economic or military mass to organise the defence of Europe by herself. Britain can be an indispensable component of a European coalition against Russian expansionism, but she cannot substitute for one.
France and Germany present a different problem. Both countries are experiencing profound changes in their domestic politics, accompanied by the growth of political movements challenging assumptions that governed European policy for much of the post-war period. In Germany, the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland has turned questions about relations with Russia, sanctions, military expenditure and support for Ukraine into increasingly contentious domestic issues. In France, political fragmentation and the growth of the nationalist right have weakened the old expectation that a stable political centre will indefinitely control the country’s strategic direction.
It would be simplistic to describe these developments merely as Europe ‘moving to the right’, because the European right contains contradictory traditions. Some right-wing movements are intensely Atlanticist, militaristic and hostile towards Russia. Others favour accommodation with Moscow, oppose sanctions and regard the war in Ukraine as somebody else’s quarrel. Still others want a heavily armed but strategically autonomous Europe, distrustful simultaneously of Russia and the United States. The strategic problem is therefore not the ideological label attached to these parties but the political fragmentation they represent.
Security policy requires continuity over decades. Missiles, ammunition factories, nuclear doctrines, air-defence systems and military alliances cannot sensibly be redesigned after every election. Yet European politics is becoming more volatile precisely when strategic continuity is becoming more important. A government may commit itself to enormous increases in military expenditure only to discover that its successor has different priorities, while an adversary need merely wait for the next election and hope that political exhaustion achieves what military pressure could not.
Russia represents the darkest element of this picture. The Russian Federation can no longer adequately be understood simply as an authoritarian country in the conventional sense. Years of war have produced a political and economic system increasingly organised around military mobilisation, internal repression, nationalist ideology and permanent confrontation with an external enemy. Opposition has been suppressed, independent media largely extinguished and political legitimacy increasingly constructed around the proposition that Russia is engaged in a historic struggle against a hostile West.
The danger in such a system is not merely ideological but institutional. States organised around prolonged war develop constituencies that benefit from the continuation of confrontation. Military industries expand, security services accumulate political authority, bureaucratic careers become dependent upon defence expenditure and propaganda systems require enemies against whom the population can be mobilised. The longer these arrangements persist, the more difficult it becomes to return to ordinary politics without destabilising the structures that war itself has created.
Russia has also increasingly blurred the distinction between peace and war. Cyber operations, sabotage, disinformation, interference with infrastructure, mysterious drone incidents and covert activity create an environment in which European states may find themselves under attack without being able easily to say that they are at war. This ambiguity can be useful because it permits governments to avoid escalation, but it is also exceptionally dangerous because it creates opportunities for miscalculation.
A communications cable is destroyed beneath the Baltic Sea. An ammunition depot explodes. An airport is closed after unidentified drones appear above it. A computer network suddenly fails. A military installation suffers an unexplained accident. Each incident is individually deniable and may have several possible explanations, but the cumulative effect is to create a political atmosphere in which every unexplained disaster is attributed to hostile action and every adversary’s precaution is interpreted as preparation for something worse.
This is how wars may begin without anybody actually wanting one. The First World War did not begin because the governments of Europe collectively decided that destroying their civilisation would be desirable. It emerged from alliance commitments, mobilisation schedules, fear, nationalism, miscalculation and the belief in several capitals that hesitation would leave them strategically weaker. The analogy with 1914 should not be exaggerated, because nuclear weapons fundamentally alter the incentives facing modern governments, but one lesson remains important: complicated security systems can produce outcomes that none of their participants individually intended.
Imagine a Russian drone striking a NATO military installation and killing several dozen soldiers. Imagine an act of sabotage destroying critical infrastructure and causing mass civilian casualties. Imagine Russian and NATO aircraft exchanging fire over the Baltic Sea, or a missile intended for western Ukraine malfunctioning and landing upon Polish territory. None of these events requires Moscow or NATO deliberately to decide upon general European war. The difficulty begins on the following morning, when governments must decide what they are going to do about it.
Political opponents accuse leaders of weakness. Military commanders recommend retaliation sufficient to restore deterrence. One side moves aircraft, ships and missiles defensively, while the other interprets those movements as preparations for attack. Moscow responds with further deployments, which NATO in turn regards as evidence that its original fears were justified. Each government believes itself to be responding prudently to the aggressive conduct of the other, and escalation develops a momentum independent of anybody’s original intentions.
This is why the deterioration of diplomatic relations between Russia and the West is so dangerous. Diplomacy is most important between governments that dislike one another, because friends scarcely need diplomats whereas enemies desperately do. The purpose of diplomacy is not primarily to exchange agreeable speeches at receptions. It is to ensure that, at three o’clock in the morning after an unidentified missile has destroyed something important, somebody knows whom to telephone and believes that the person answering the telephone has sufficient authority to prevent events getting worse.
The United States once provided the overwhelming force capable of suppressing many of these uncertainties. America has not abandoned NATO and there remain formidable American military forces in Europe, but Washington increasingly regards European security through the prism of burden-sharing and competing global commitments. This does not necessarily constitute betrayal or even indifference in the literal sense. Great powers possess finite resources, and the United States may simply conclude that wealthy European countries ought to assume substantially greater responsibility for defending their own continent while American resources are concentrated upon other theatres.
Europe is responding by rearming. Defence expenditure is rising, ammunition factories are being expanded, military procurement is accelerating and subjects once regarded as relics of the Cold War have returned to public discussion. Governments are reconsidering conscription, civil defence, strategic stockpiles, air-defence systems, hardened infrastructure and the resilience of electricity and communications networks. The vocabulary of European politics is changing because Europeans no longer regard major war as inconceivable.
This does not mean that war is becoming inevitable. Rearmament may make war less likely if it persuades potential aggressors that military adventures will fail. A heavily defended Europe possessing credible armed forces, substantial ammunition reserves and effective nuclear deterrence is less attractive to attack than a Europe that assumes the United States will always arrive in time to rescue it. The crucial question is whether European military power can develop faster than European political cohesion deteriorates.
There is also a tendency to discuss European security as though Europe consisted principally of Britain, France and Germany. This increasingly misrepresents the strategic geography of the continent. Poland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Romania, the Baltic states and Ukraine herself are becoming central to the European military balance. Poland is building one of the continent’s largest armed forces, while Finnish and Swedish membership of NATO has transformed the strategic geography of northern Europe. Ukraine possesses military experience on a scale available to virtually no other European country.
The centre of gravity of European security is therefore moving eastwards. For decades the political imagination of European integration was organised around the Franco-German relationship, because reconciliation between France and Germany was the founding miracle of the post-war European project. Yet the principal security questions of the twenty-first century lie increasingly along an arc running from Finland through the Baltic states and Poland to Ukraine, Romania and the Black Sea. The countries along this frontier do not regard Russia as an abstract geopolitical puzzle. They regard her as a neighbouring military power with a demonstrated willingness to use force.
This produces profound differences in perception within Europe. A politician in Paris or Rome may reasonably ask what concessions or compromises might produce a durable settlement with Moscow. A politician in Tallinn, Warsaw or Helsinki may equally reasonably ask whether concessions would persuade the Kremlin that military coercion works. These perspectives emerge from different histories and geographies, and neither can simply be wished away. The challenge is to construct a European security order capable of reconciling them without paralysing itself.
At the centre of everything stands Ukraine. The war can no longer sensibly be treated as an isolated territorial dispute compartmentalised from the wider European security system. Ukraine has become battlefield, buffer, strategic laboratory and political test simultaneously. Her armed forces have accumulated extraordinary experience in drone warfare, electronic warfare, artillery, dispersed command and the defence of infrastructure, while Russia has reorganised substantial parts of her economy and society around sustaining the conflict.
The outcome need not be understood solely through the binary concepts of Ukrainian or Russian victory. One of the most dangerous possibilities is chronic instability: ceasefires repeatedly collapsing, borders remaining contested, sabotage continuing, armies remaining permanently mobilised and European governments rearming against an adversary whose intentions they assume to be hostile. Such an arrangement would not constitute peace in any meaningful historical sense. It would be an armed truce, and armed truces can last for decades before either stabilising into durable deterrence or collapsing catastrophically.
There remain powerful reasons to believe that a Third World War will not occur. Nuclear deterrence is the most obvious. Russian, American, British and French leaders all understand that direct conflict between nuclear powers contains the possibility of escalation beyond any rational political objective. However irresponsible rhetoric may become, nuclear weapons impose an extraordinary discipline upon governments because there are circumstances in which nobody can plausibly imagine victory.
NATO also remains a formidable military alliance, European governments are spending more on defence and Russia has compelling reasons to avoid direct warfare with it. Whatever conclusions one draws from the course of the war in Ukraine, deliberately attacking an alliance encompassing several nuclear powers and an economy vastly larger than Russia’s would entail risks of an entirely different order. European political fragmentation likewise does not automatically entail strategic collapse. Democracies have survived profound disagreements before, and governments may change while institutions and alliances endure.
The danger is therefore not principally that somebody in Moscow, Washington, London, Paris or Berlin wakes up one morning and decides to begin the Third World War. The danger is that the machinery designed to prevent such a war becomes progressively less reliable while the number of opportunities for accidents and misunderstandings increases. Deterrence depends not merely upon possessing weapons but upon adversaries understanding one another’s intentions, limits and red lines sufficiently well to avoid testing them inadvertently.
Europe after 1945 was constructed around an extraordinary ambition: that power politics might gradually be subordinated to institutions. Borders would become less significant, trade would make warfare irrational, international law would constrain governments, NATO would provide security and European integration would dissolve ancient rivalries. For several generations this arrangement worked remarkably well, to the point at which many Europeans began to imagine that it reflected a permanent transformation in human political affairs rather than an unusually favourable historical settlement protected by American military power.
That confidence has disappeared. Europe is rediscovering borders, armaments, strategic industries, energy security, civil defence and national resilience. Mobilisation, deterrence, sabotage, air defence, conscription and nuclear weapons have returned to ordinary political vocabulary. None of these things proves that another world war is approaching, but collectively they demonstrate that Europeans have ceased believing that major war is impossible.
This recognition may ultimately be healthy. The most dangerous period in European history may prove to have been the period during which governments persuaded themselves that traditional geopolitics had disappeared permanently. Recognising danger permits preparation, and preparation may deter aggression. The paradox is that Europe may have to prepare seriously for war precisely in order to avoid having one.
Britain cannot defend the continent alone. France and Germany cannot provide coherent European leadership if their domestic politics make long-term foreign policy impossible. Eastern European states cannot indefinitely carry the psychological and material burden of confronting Russia while western Europe treats security as somebody else’s problem. Ukraine cannot permanently serve as the battlefield upon which the rest of Europe discovers the characteristics of twenty-first-century warfare, and the United States cannot reasonably be expected to assume forever responsibilities that wealthy European societies possess the resources to undertake themselves.
Europe consequently needs something she has largely avoided constructing since 1945: a genuinely European strategic order capable of surviving periods of American distraction or indifference. That requires armed forces capable of fighting without assuming immediate American reinforcement, integrated air and missile defences, vast ammunition reserves, interoperable military industries, resilient energy and communications infrastructure and credible British and French nuclear deterrence. It also requires something much cheaper but perhaps equally important: permanent mechanisms for communication with Moscow that continue functioning precisely when political relations are at their worst.
None of these things is inherently militaristic. Their purpose is to make the cost and uncertainty of aggression sufficiently great that nobody attempts it, while ensuring that accidents do not become wars merely because governments have forgotten how to speak to one another. Deterrence without diplomacy becomes brittle, while diplomacy without deterrence becomes pleading. Europe requires both.
The Third World War is not inevitable and may never happen. Nevertheless the conditions under which catastrophic wars become possible are once again recognisable upon the European continent: competing military blocs, ideological hostility, rearmament, weakened diplomatic communication, domestic political instability, contested borders and repeated confrontations in which each participant fears that restraint will be interpreted as weakness. Europe has encountered this landscape before, even if nuclear weapons and modern institutions make the contemporary version substantially different from its twentieth-century predecessors.
Europe also possesses advantages her predecessors lacked. She is enormously wealthy, technologically sophisticated and densely institutionalised. NATO remains an extraordinarily powerful military alliance, while the European Union provides mechanisms for political and economic coordination that would have been unimaginable to the diplomats stumbling towards catastrophe in 1914. Britain and France possess independent nuclear arsenals, eastern European states are rapidly strengthening their conventional forces and Ukraine has demonstrated that Russian military power is neither unlimited nor irresistible.
Whether these advantages are sufficient depends upon decisions that have not yet been made. The principal danger is therefore not destiny but drift: the condition in which nobody intends catastrophe but everybody postpones the decisions necessary to prevent it. Britain waits for Europe, Europe waits for America, America waits for Europeans to defend themselves, Russia probes for weaknesses and Ukraine continues fighting while everybody else debates what the eventual European security order ought to look like.
History has an unpleasant habit of making decisions when politicians decline to make them themselves. Europe is not marching inexorably towards a Third World War, but it is once again living in circumstances in which such a war can be imagined without absurdity. The task of European statesmanship is to ensure that imagination never becomes experience, and that the sound of distant drums remains precisely that: distant.
