YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Apps

lines on the record: 37
first: 2026-05-01
most recent: 2026-05-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And Vladimir Pollution Institute will be older. So I think I would say still chance of one in three, but if you're looking for the period I'm worried about, I would say 2029 to 2035. Is probably my period of if we get through to 2035 in one piece, then I think we will have sort of stabilized at a higher level of tension. I wouldn't be if we get 2035 in one piece, then I wouldn't be surprised if we get 2045 in one piece and 55 maybe you reckon a cold war balance or whatever. But I think... Think we were all obsessing every problem, but actually, I think we understand what this presidency looks like. We do not understand what the next presidency looks like. And for me, that is the one that I would sleep over.”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My worries started to go up pretty dramatically starting in 2029. A new US president, Navy J.D. Vaughance, maybe a left-winger we've never heard of. Either way, if you look at what happened in 2021, No sooner had Biden come into office. Vladimir Putin mobilized 110,000 troops on the borders in Ukraine. I would be incredibly unsurprised if the Russians and Chinese did not do that simultaneously when the new US post comes into office in 2029. So we could easily see a mass Chinese mobilization to intimidate Taiwan, particularly if Taiwan has not voted Komin Tang of its electorates the previous year. Going to be an election year in both Germany and Britain in 2029, so that makes it really hard to send more troops forward to Estonia or Lithuania in the case of France maybe weren't run by the far right by that point, but it also may not be.”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I would say over the next 10 years it's about the same. I would also say that. Certainly, for my case, I am more worried about the era after 2029 than I am about the current era. I don't think a global war is going to erupt during the Trump administration. I think there's going to be lots of stuff going on. I think the world is very much being tested. And one of the phrases that I've come up with in the book is this is not a world war, but it's a battle for the world. And you can see lots of nations, Turkey, Japan, the Saudis, the Chinese obviously, are all looking at what the US is doing, seeing a bunch of opportunities and going forward. Having said that, I would be. Very surprised if Walk came to Europe in the next three years.”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there were enough of them to hold the despite the Americans delivering less aid this year, despite the fact the French running out of people, they are holding that line the last six months or so. And that may be where Europe ends up. Having said that, depends on where your threat horizon is. If the Russians come this year, that might be a bit dodgy. Of course, there was a Paidani Ukraine.”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Europe is not going to be able to adopt that approach to deterrence, I think it's going to struggle to. So I think the European model for deterrence, certainly in mainland Europe, is going to look like Ukraine. So it's going to look like much larger, arguably less skilled armies, but which are capable. But I mean, Me say less skilled if you actually look at a Ukrainian brigade. Ukraine struggles to do what we provide arms maneuver, tying a full divisional level sort of glorious military maneuvers across the plains. But each individual assault brigade is pretty sophisticated. They're run by someone who's usually got their own kind of business and other connections. They usually buy their own drones.”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And UCT, I know I'm in Tampa at the moment, which is home with US Special Operations Command, where there are a lot of very fit men and slightly fewer women who are in love with the idea of being a warrior elite. That sort of comes with it, the assumption that the society is a bit useless. I mean, the problem with the warrior elite is that it's not really enough to kind of operate in this kind of world. You can do things with a warrior elite. And in fact, the US, I mean, the US models go to war or indeed preventing is probably going to remain a professional military and special forces deployed in places like Taiwan, Eastern Europe, because if you deploy 15 US tanks and you... 60 special operations forces somewhere like Estonia, the Russians may never come.”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The risk of staying the obvious if you start funneling large chunks of your society through the military, you immediately erode the sense of control of people who are used to running that military, particularly what you might call an office of class, those who rejoin, those who can keep on joining and keep on becoming officers and the sort of groups that we get are generals from. There would be a substantive change to that if we took people from across British society. And that always worries people at the top of any kind of environment. There is, I think, the feeling that A lot of it's snobbery. I think there is this feeling that”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So if everyone, the truth is that if everyone in the UK formed national service and if one or two percent of them spent a year garrison, Then that alone would probably yield enough boots on the ground in Estonia to mean the Russians were going to cut. Now, we seem to be really, really struggling to have that discussion. And I think there are various reasons for that. But I mean, in the military, as I'm saying, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, but real insiders talk career track.”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so I think the first thing. To realize that if terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism Only have to look at things like the vetting of Peter Mandelson. That is obviously a system we're spending a lot of money on something that actually generates surprisingly little in the way of useful outcomes. So I think we have to accept that we got very lazy. My personal view, I mean, it's like a podcast about the future of liberalism. Well, if you happen to believe, if you happen to be broadly liberal with a small L. That will only be a liberal society will only exist as long as enough people in it are prepared to defend it. And the more people are prepared to defend something, the less likely it is that individuals are going to have to do anything about it.”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Will catch up with this. Obviously, the Ukrainians are already there. But I think the British establishment and indeed the transatlantic jury establishment to a lesser extent is on a journey and it takes a while to catch up.”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Environment where the Indians, Pakistanis found themselves where sort of lobbying the occasional missile, each other is fine, at least for a few days. We may even end up in a scenario where having lots of people fighting each other across no man's land, as in Ukraine is a plausible option. I mean, one of the intellectual games I occasionally have played with myself, although it's in no sense funny, is how long would it take me to explain to my great-grandfather's platoon in the trench in the First World War? Or is going on now? And the answer is not very long. And one of the reasons why I wouldn't take very long is because when someone put their hands up and goes, well, what does war look like in the 2020s? We go, well, if you're in a trench, it looks exactly like this, except there is now netting over the top of the trench to stop a drone flying in to which they then will say, well, what's a drone? You go, well, you know what? You know, we've just invented aircraft. It turns out they've got smaller. And that would be about it. So, you know, I think”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't even know if London has aerid signs anymore. I suspect it would just be done through your mobile phone. But if an air ride's here and sounds in London in a year's time. I would be astounded if London was then annihilated with a nuclear warhead because we would then respond in kind to the Russians and the world would end. Would expect it to be the sort of thing you currently see overnight in Ukraine. Siren would go off, you would hear four, five, six, seven large explosions, some of which might be closer than others. And then people would get up and go to work in the morning again. And it is not impossible to imagine an environment where we gradually escalate along those lines quite a long time. It sort of was a bit 1984 like, you know, where sort of Eurasia had always been at war with Oceania. There is this risk that we move into”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The development of nuclear weapons in 1945 changed that argument. And my grandfather was in an officer's medicine in what is now Pakistan at the time, preparing to invade Japan. They all thought they were going to die. Then suddenly nuclear weapons were invented. And the conversation over lunch was, well, that's the end of ordinary soldiery. And to an extent it was. But Ukraine and in fact the Korea war in 1951 restarted or showed that ordinary soldiers hadn't gone away. And by ordinary soldiering, I don't mean sort of wandering around the Kyber Pass. I mean large numbers of people sitting in trenches, fighting things out for the future of Europe or the world. And I think If a new war comes. Going to feel more like the Second and First World War than that apocalypse nuclear exchange that we were expecting in the Cold War.”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“None of them were going to volunteer for military service during the long periods of peace. They wanted to get on and build families and raise children and do all the stuff they did. But there was an awareness that sometimes you had to step up. And I think one of the things that we are struggling with now is that the nuclear...”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the lack of confidence and willingness and awareness is actually on behalf of the establishment rather than ordinary people because I think ordinary people are much more prepared to have that kind of discussion. I was watching an old war office song from the Second World War about sort of people joining the army and because scripted in about 1942 and one of them says, well, I'm a bricklayer. I want to go back to being a bricklayer and I don't care who I have to fight to get there. I think there is an understanding. Because most families remember my grandparents served in the Second War, my great-grandparents in the first.”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Partly, I think, for sort of reasons of ego and not quite being able to be prepared to engage with that debate, I think those at the top of the British military do not like that conversation. They certainly don't like being compared to General Sea of the First World War. And they don't particularly want to have a conversation about what we're doing in Afghanistan. So I think...”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I appear on radio stations like LBC or I ask questions people like the Sun or I just talk to people, ordinary people, they're all very aware that the risk of war has increased. They don't have a massive confidence in Britain's generals. And actually, if you look at why if they were to pick free examples out of thin air, they would say Afghanistan most recently and the First World War a long time ago, neither of which are British generals covered themselves in glory. I think”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, if I'm honest, I think it's because I think this is true of lots of countries, but I think we saw this in the Brexit referendum. The British sort of civil service and political class are very actual British people think. And they often don't notice, I remember meeting a foreign office Mandarin who had only realized at the last minute what was about to happen with the Brexit referendum when his car broke down outside London and he realized that when he went to the garage, no one in the entire village that he'd stopped him was going to vote remain. So simultaneously, I think.”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is not a very good sort of recruitment strategy and it's not a very sort of what you need to say is what some of the European states say, which we think we can avoid this war, but in order to avoid this war, we have to X, Y, and Z, that may mean you need to pay more tax. It may mean you have to spend your pounds of dollars differently. And it may mean that we have more people have to spend time in uniform. But that is not because we want to fight. It is because if we over-prepare, then the fight will never come. And that seems to be a conversation that the UK not just political elite, but also kind of military and government structures are very unprepared to have with the British people.”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, ordinary people are very aware of this risk, but government is not prepared to have that conversation with them. And we also have this very interesting and slightly bizarre sort of conversation between the military and society where the military sort of says, well, ordinary people don't understand this, but more people must join the army because there's going to be a big war, at which stage lots of”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The threat that is now obviously different to what we thought it was. So, for example, it now seems if we did fight a three or four-day war with Russia and Europe or a 10-day war or a five-year war, and it was mostly conventional. I would be incredibly surprised if London was not struck in the same way that Keem or Lviv have been in Ukraine with intermediate range of ballistic missiles, for example. And yet there is no conversation at all in the UK about the basic civil defence requirements to deal with relatively light level of threat. We're talking about probably a lower number of, certainly less than the blitz or less than the V1 V2 offensive that hit London in 1944 and 1945. Certainly something that the UK government could readily prepare for and meet the threat of, both by building air defence and by building up civil defence. But there is an unwillingness to have that conversation. And I think if you look at some of the opinion polling in the UK in particular,”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not just a long time since the Second World War, but actually the Second World War is seen as an aberration. We've only had nine years slightly more than that of great power over the last 130 years, even if you include the Napoleonic Wars. We're really only talking about sort of a couple of decades over a couple of centuries. So we're not used to that existential threat. We're used to wars being things that we fight in place like Afghanistan. And I think we've been unusually slow to wake up to”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot more Germany. I think it's going to spend twice as much in the next five years as it did in the last five very mixed picture. But again, on the ammunition threshold, I think they're likely to be outpacing the US. I think Ukraine, for example, is already outpacing the US and things like small drones that it makes. There's a whole bunch of quite different dynamics in play there. I think the answer to your question as to why it's been so mixed is a mixture of threat perceptions. If you are Finland, if you are Poland, if you are and the Baltic states, then war with Russia is something that happened within living memory, occupation by Russia and all of those cases is something that happened within recent memory. I'm 44. So if I was a Polish grown up my first eight, nine years with Russian troops in the country, similar in the Baltic state. Whereas obviously the UK...”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I mean, I think firstly, military spending does not equal military capability. The UK, for example, spends 20% more on defense than Israel does. And in fact, the UK makes up a fairly significant number of NATO defense spending in total. It's been the largest spender in Europe for quite a large 25 years. And the UK, I think most people are increasingly coming to believe, has been uniquely, you know, I don't want to say inept, but uniquely sort of ill-judged in what it spendeth money on. Because actually it's bought about it spent a lot of money buying about two-thirds of a capability, but not the last third to make it actually work properly. So you've got aircraft carriers and tanks and armored vehicles and so forth, but you're missing things like some of the infant countermeasures. You're missing some of the lot of ammunition. So actually, you don't get that much. Other countries, for example, Finland spends a fraction of what we do is actually remarkably well prepared for a Russian attack on its territory. Poland spending...”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just short of war, which is also distinctly possible, then we might go back and say, yes, actually Syria was part of that, going back as far as 2011, 12, 13, maybe Sudan was part of that. If we stay short of a war, we'll look at it more like the Cold War and we'll say that these were just kind of proxy conflicts that never went over the edge. So, you know, one of the things that looking at the book is it is a first or second draft of history, but we don't know how that story ends yet. And, you know, obviously what happens in the next 10 years is going to hugely shape our understanding of what is happening now and indeed the last decade and a half.”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“National wars will turn into world wars. So at that point they would have definitely sort of maintained that the invasion of Abyssinia by Italy, for example, in the mid-1930s was a precursor to the Second World War. And of course, if we do end up in a larger war or if we end up in a period that, you know,”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Companies' national interests, or those countries able to pursue their national interest, including by lethal military force, or by delivering military supplies. So there is definitely a kind of overlap. I mean, you make an interesting question about how much these are tied together. I'm in Tampa, Florida at the moment on the plane out. I was watching Nuremberg, the film about the Nuremberg trials. And one of the justifications from the Allies for holding those trials and indeed building the entire United Nations system was this feeling in 1945 that”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt that most of those conflicts have a sort of axis of upheaval element to them. So it's sometimes very complicated. So for example, in Sudan, different elements of the Russian state or the Russian government and the Vardner group were at one stage on different sides in that conflict. If you look at Myanmar, there's definitely a sort of slight sort of China versus sort of the US-led bloc element there. On the other hand, there's also a new bunch of rising powers of which the United Arab Emirates is probably the biggest single example. Turkey, of course, another really, really big example of countries that are not trying to overturn the West. In fact, both Turkey and the UAE are quite happy with them, well, broadly happy with their relations with the West in general, but they want to gradually sort of tip the world, and particularly their respective regions. So in the case of UAE, that means that kind of Indian Ocean region. In the case of Turkey, it means the Middle East and into Central Asia into places where those”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that is a particularly interesting form of conflict because that's the sort of thing that could, you know, once you've done that once or twice and you've seen this within the Middle East, the US and Iran fought a... it's also proving remarkably difficult to get out of”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the risk, I think, somewhere I particularly like Europe, and we have arguably seen this in the Middle East over the last 20 years, is that each thing's escalation happens gradually over years and years and years that we've been a 25-year 40-year confrontation with Iran, that gradually you get closer and closer to this devastating or at least damaging conflict that you weren't expecting, or you were hoping to avoid and you end up getting into it. I think actually the most interesting conflict of the last two years, though, is actually the Indo-Pakistani four-day war of 2025. So people remember that was May 2025. India and Pakistan fought a four-day conflict. And that was interesting because they were both incredibly restrained in what they did while still killing each other's people. So their aircraft never left each other's airspace. India's never penetrating Pakistani airspace with manned aircraft nor vice versa. But they fired lots of missiles and drones at each other over a four-day period before stepping back from the brink.”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's probably pretty low for the simple reason that. Less countries want big wars. They don't tend to start. The First World War did not start until Germany invaded Belgium. The Second World War didn't start until Hitler invaded Poland. If countries don't want wars, they're generally quite good at avoiding them. The Cold War is a good example. There were various incidents at various points in the Cold War, and they never ran out the edge. Is a slightly different sort of danger, which people sometimes talk about in terms of boiling the frog, which is where your idea is, and I'm not sure if this is true, and you never tried it. But if you put a frog in boiling water and you boil it slowly, the frog doesn't jump out of the water because it doesn't realize it's being too hot until it's too hot and then it dies.”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Khmer Tang win that election so they can get away with finding a way of getting Taiwan back absorbed within the mainland without firing a shot. Of course, if that doesn't happen, it may well not happen, then the Chinese will be fully tooled up from 2029, at least they certainly hope they will be, and then it comes down to whether those at the top in Beijing are ready to pull that trigger. And that is going to be one of the great unknowables as we go through 2029 and into the 2030s because we'll also have a new US president at that point.”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It would take China to make a deliberate decision to invade Taiwan to kickstart that conflict. Not unlike Europe in the 1930s, where it took Germany's deliberate decision to invade Poland or to trigger the conflict or Belgium in the First World War. So as long as China holds back from that decision, and right now it doesn't look like it believes its military is ready, Xi Jinping has just fired almost all of his generals, which is very rarely a sign of a country that believes it's entirely confident that his military is working properly. So it doesn't feel like they're ready there. And they also have another opportunity to achieve what they want without war, which is the Taiwan election in 2028, where the Chinese are clearly hoping that the Khmer Tang, which is the Taiwanese political party now closest to China and one that is most friendly to Xi Jinping, and they said it would invite him over on a visit if they won the next election. So the Chinese are going to be using military pressure and sort of diplomatic pressure and hoping.”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wouldn't say to stay with stability because both sides are arming fast. So The thing about the Asia Pacific is that it would take one side, specifically China, because the United States is not going to try and start a war in the Indo-Pacific.”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the Middle East aren't doing really interesting and quite lethal and dangerous things in their own right at the same time.”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Europe, you've got obviously this slightly strange dynamic where you've got a hot war going on in Ukraine, but you've also got the kind of colder war but with hybrid characteristics between NATO nations and Russia, where Russia isn't willing to physically attack with military force NATO nations because that might start a major conflict and still seems quite worried about what the US would do if it tried to sort of cross that threshold, but it's doing all kinds of other things in the hybrid domain and obviously in Ukraine. But I mean, if you're looking for the place where a major global war might start, I still think you're looking at the Asia Pacific. And in fact, paradoxically, the fact that no one is prepared to risk a war in, although these haven't been so far in the South China Sea and around Taiwan, tells you how dangerous people believe that conflict will be if it started. So if you're looking for one flashpoint to set the world ablaze, it's probably still Taiwan. But that doesn't mean that you...”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's a really interesting way of phrasing the question. I mean, obviously, in terms of the most kind of volatile and kinetic, to use the sort of military euphemism for things that are actually going on, it's got to be a sort of toss-up between Europe and the Middle East because you've got a live war still taking place in Ukraine. And you've got a live but quite unusual conflict taking place in the Middle East, but we're still involved thousands, possibly even more than 10,000 US strikes against Iranian targets, obviously gone on for more than two months. Seen not just strikes on Iran and Israel, which we've kind of got used to, but also Iran hitting at the Gulf states, including places like Dubai that was seen as pretty safe.”
2026-05-01 · Intelligence Squared · What Will Trigger the Next World War? With Peter Apps · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT