Ten Steps to Prevent World War Three
Tobias Ellwood
(Blink, 2026)
It’s the kind of book I find hard to walk past while browsing the shelves in Waterstone’s. After all, I, along with about 8 billion others, have a vested interest in preventing WWIII. It’s a question I’ve been pondering for quite some time. How best can we all get along together, without destroying ourselves and the planet? So I bought the book, and read it over three days.
Tobias Ellwood was an MP between 2005 and 2024, during which time he has been a Foreign Minister, Defence Minister, and Chair of the House of Commons Defence Select Committee. On the book’s jacket his interests and expertise are listed as geopolitics, foreign relations, military strategy, terrorism, defence, British politics, Ukraine, the Middle East, and NATO. He attended Sandhurst and he served in the British Army. So it would be fair to expect that he knows what he is talking about.
His thesis, in brief, is that the global order is fracturing, conflict is returning, and we are not prepared. Hard to argue with that. But here is a plan that may allow us to step back from the unthinkable: Stand for something, Know our enemies, Stop repeating history, Spot the new battlefields, Regroup with our allies, Get stronger and smarter, Move to a war footing, Put our house in order, Build the off-ramps, and Reassert Statecraft.
I confess I was flummoxed right from the start. Stand for Something (Step 1). But stand for what? I thought it might be Christian values. But had that been the case, Step 2 would surely not have been “Know our enemies”, but rather “Love our enemies”. However Jesus does not feature in the index. Neither, incidentally, does Scotland, the UK’s depository of nuclear weapons. “Soft power” is extensively indexed. It’s an expression I detest. You can try to hijack them for nefarious purposes, but culture, music, the arts, have got nothing to do with military might.
Was I convinced by the overall argument? I have to admit I’m viscerally biased against anybody who can write a sentence like “A coherent, confident Europe can serve as a stabilising counterweight, reinforcing off-ramps with credibility and leverage.” (Step 9). Coherent? Does he mean cohesive? You can reinforce an off-ramp with concrete, but with credibility? I’m not a fan of abstract language.
But we have to consider what is meant by “World War Three”. The book’s cover depicts a fiery mushroom cloud atop billowing smoke. We are talking here about nuclear Armageddon, and how to avoid it. The question arises, have we ever demonstrably avoided it in the past? And if so, how did we do it? It is said that the closest we have ever come to a nuclear exchange occurred at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. I believe on that occasion it was averted by a Soviet submarine commander lurking somewhere off New York who decided to ignore an order to launch. We certainly owe him a debt of gratitude. Since then, the aptly named MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) has held us back from the brink. Nobody in their right mind would initiate an attack. But that presupposes that our world leaders are in their right mind.
A more probable scenario is that a nuclear exchange will occur by accident. This I think is where Mr Ellwood’s book falls short. It’s all very well to say “Move to a War Footing” (Step 7) but, as is explained in detail, this involves developing more and more sophisticated applications of surveillance, drone technology, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and the myriad fiendish devices of the new Cold War that is occurring in a cyber Grey Zone. As the systems become more and more complex, and indeed more autonomous, it seems likely that a mistake, an irreversible mistake, will occur. That would suggest that a more appropriate title to Mr Ellwood’s book might be “Ten Steps to Guarantee World War Three”.
Even without the nuclear threat, the arms race that already exists guarantees a world of perpetual war, as so presciently described by Orwell in his depiction of the three great spheres of influence in 1984, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. We in the UK are a satellite of Oceania, known as Airstrip One; a refuelling station for US bombers en route to the Middle East.
Mr Ellwood doesn’t actually address the fundamental question: how can we free ourselves from this bondage? How can we get over our apparent addiction to violence? How, indeed, can we all get along together, without destroying ourselves and the planet? Mr Ellwood doesn’t seem to think this is a question worth considering. War, perpetual war, he tells us, is the natural state. We used to say the same thing about disease. And poverty.
I don’t know about you, but this depiction of humanity as inherently violent doesn’t fit in with my personal experience. I spent a large part of my career amid the blood and thunder of the hospital Emergency Department. People say to me, “You must have seen life in the raw there!” In fact, my own experience was that most people I encountered were very nice. Of course there was the odd sociopath. One or two people did threaten to kill me. But they represented a vanishingly small minority. At home and abroad, any time I’ve been in trouble, I’ve been overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers.
It seems to me that wars are not instigated by ordinary folk. They are waged between the rich and powerful. They always have been. Therefore the last people to tell us how to avoid war are the people who are in charge.
I think we should ask our young people. They don’t want to go to war either. We should ask them to turn all their creative talents, scientific and humanitarian, towards abolishing it. Don’t go into the world of finance, or IT, or AI. Figure out how to achieve and maintain a lasting peace.
But Mr Ellwood wants to bring back national service. He assures us it won’t be like Dad’s Army. Our youth can perfect their skills, in drone technology, in quantum computing, in AI… What was it Private Frazer said to Captain Mainwaring? “We’re all doomed.”
jamescalumcampbell 