It’s a brave man who makes predictions of future war in the age of Donald Trump. Since the manuscript of The Next World War was handed in last autumn, the US president had added Venezuela to his list of snatched military victories. And despite a barrage of criticism Trump still says he wants Greenland, although he seems to rule out using force against the Greenlanders. Anxious Nato members talk openly about a ruptured alliance. As the book was written and re-written largely in 2025, Peter Apps and his editors at Wildfire must have wished that he had turned out a book on fly-fishing or mini-golf.
War-scare literature, of course, has a long history. In the decades before the First…