It's an Existential Threat! | Dmitri Trenin and Anatol Lieven

## Framing the stakes: Why this conversation matters What emerges from this exchange is a stark reassessment of the international landscape: we are no longer watching a renewed Cold War; according to the discussion, we are already inside a global conflict whose character more closely resembles the total wars of the twentieth century. That claim forces a re-evaluation of familiar assumptions about restraint, rules, and the limits of acceptable state conduct. If the dynamics described in the conversation are correct, the consequences extend far beyond the immediate battlefields of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. They speak to an architecture of international politics in which norms are fraying, proxies and overt actors blur, and the calculus of escalation shifts in ways that make miscalculation vastly more dangerous. This article unpacks those claims, examines the patterns the discussion highlights, and explores what they mean for neutral and nonaligned states trying to navigate an increasingly volatile system. ## The central claim: from Cold War equilibrium to rolling total war A central thrust of the conversation is the argument that the current global confrontation is not analogous to the Cold War’s long, regulated bipolar rivalry. Rather than two ideational blocs tacitly accepting coexistence and mutual limits, the conflict now features rolling, interconnected theaters of violence in which states and non-state actors repeatedly violate previous restraints. The conversation stresses two qualitative shifts. First, kinetic, high-intensity combat is taking place not only in peripheral proxy arenas but also—directly and indirectly—on the territory and strategic assets of major powers. Second, the tools of competition now include targeted sneak attacks, political decapitation, and operations that intentionally blur the difference between wartime and peacetime norms. Together these developments, the discussion argues, create a far more perilous environment than the classic Cold War balance of terror and mutual deterrence did. This is not merely semantic: treating the situation as a Cold War implies room for long-term competition within understood boundaries, safeguards against escalation, and predictable crisis management mechanisms. Viewing it as a form of Third World War suggests those safeguards are weakening or gone, and that escalation dynamics can accelerate quickly, crossing thresholds previously respected—especially those around strategic nuclear forces and critical military infrastructure. ## Converging theaters: Eastern Europe and the Middle East The conversation draws attention to the way separate conflicts are beginning to feed one another. Eastern Europe—most visibly the war in Ukraine—has become a kinetic front where one great power directly deploys forces and suffers battlefield losses. At the same time, the Middle East continues to be a theater where covert actions, targeted strikes, and episodic escalations among states and proxies shape broader regional dynamics. The discussion posits that these theaters are not isolated; they are converging into a single system of contestation in which tactical successes or setbacks reverberate elsewhere. Examples cited in the exchange include cross-border strikes, covert decapitation operations against scientific and military personnel, and attacks on strategic assets that signal a willingness to breach prior taboos. When theaters converge, the risk is twofold: localized escalations can trigger wider reprisals, and the normalization of clandestine or deniable operations lowers the political and moral barrier to adopting similar tactics elsewhere. In short, tactics that once were reserved for proxy wars and covert competition are now being used openly and opportunistically across multiple regions. ## Dehumanization as strategy: the moral logic driving escalation A recurring theme in the conversation is the instrumental role of dehumanizing rhetoric and practice in enabling extreme measures. The participants argue that portraying adversaries as subhuman or unworthy of international legal protections renders actions—assassinations, strikes on civilian-linked scientists, and attacks on noncombatants—politically and morally easier to justify. Once this dehumanization takes hold in public discourse and policy communities, it not only rationalizes harsher measures but also erodes the domestic and international constraints that might previously have checked escalation. The practical implication is disturbing: if a polity treats an opponent as outside the moral community, then strategies of total attrition and long-term destabilization become tolerable and even desirable. That, in turn, incentivizes the use of “dirty” methods—terrorism, targeted killings, sabotage—because they promise leverage without overtly crossing certain conventional red lines. The conversation warns that such normalization creates a spiral: each side points to the other’s transgressions as justification for widening the palette of acceptable means, accelerating the descent into more brutal and less controllable modes of competition. ## Paths of escalation: second fronts and the multiplication of risks Beyond rhetoric and methods, the discussion focuses on concrete escalation pathways. The most immediate danger highlighted is the opening of additional fronts—whether in adjacent disputed regions, breakaway territories, or vulnerable neighbor states. These second-front possibilities are strategically attractive to actors pursuing attrition because they can stretch an opponent’s resources, create diplomatic dilemmas, and change the political calculus of support in allied countries. The discussion also underscores how domestic political pressures in allied states can produce outsized escalation incentives. Political leaders who subsume national strategy to the perceived needs of a hegemonic partner—or who prioritize short-term signalling over long-term stability—may endorse or enable actions that risk enlarging the conflict. Moreover, technological advances (drones, precision strikes, cyber tools) and the spread of covert networks make it easier to project force asymmetrically and deniably, increasing the number of feasible targets and lowering the threshold for provocative operations. Taken together, these dynamics mean that escalation is not a linear process anchored to classical hotspots. Instead, it is a multi-directional, networked risk in which local flares can, with sufficient political will and miscalculation, link into much broader conflagrations. ## The role of Europe and the United States: hegemony, alignment, and strategic blindness The conversation frames Europe’s role as deeply entangled with the strategic priorities of a dominant power. Where Europe used to exercise more independent strategic judgment, the participants contend it now often acts in ways that reflect an alignment with the hegemon’s objectives rather than autonomous calculation. That alignment, according to the exchange, can make Europe more dangerous in aggregate: less bound to defend its own narrow national interests, it may support policies that prolong and spread conflict on behalf of a larger strategic design. This critique has two implications for neutrality and international stability. First, it suggests that alliances can amplify escalation if member states prioritize bloc cohesion over measured crisis management. Second, it underlines the fragility of assumptions that liberal democracies will necessarily behave as stabilizers; domestic politics, ideological framing, and hegemonic entanglements can all override restraint. For neutral and nonaligned states, these dynamics complicate neutrality’s practice: nonalignment can be squeezed by pressure to choose sides, by the collapse of intermediating institutions, and by the diffusion of targets and operations across multiple theaters. ## What this means for neutrality and nonalignment If

It's Already A World War. And It Will Get Worse The following is an assessment of an article written by Dmitri Trenin, a Russian thinker who I had on this channel 3 years ago. Back then Trenin was assessing that the Ukraine war was the advent of a new Cold War. He revised his views in the meantime, arguing today that we are already inside World War 3, although not all theatres of the war have erupted in kinetic warfare yet. But the direction, according to him, is pretty clear. Trenin's article: https://profile.ru/politics/epoha-vojn-tretya- mirovaya-uzhe-nachalas-no-ne-vse-eto-ponimajut-1726525/ My interview with Dmitri Trenin and Anatol Lieven 3 years go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5c-HYhYT8g Support us through our shop: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com #M2 Hello everybody, this is Pascal from Neutrality Studies, and today I want to discuss an article with you by a very important Russian thinker—namely, this one here by Dmitry Trenin on World War III that has already begun. It's a very sad topic, but this is an article that matters a lot because it is coming from a Russian expert who, only a few years ago, was, I would say, one of the West's greatest friends. And it just needs to be pointed out time and again: the way that the West made enemies left and right, and made enemies even among the people who were most adamant about having a good relationship with it, is mind-boggling. This article here was written in 2022 by my colleague Anatol Lieven, and already back then Anatol pointed out that Dmitry Trenin was one of the people who stood most for reconciliation between 1990s Russia and the West, and who was working tirelessly for basically 30 years for mutual understanding between Moscow, Washington, and even Brussels. Anatol even pointed out three years ago that losing Dmitry Trenin really means something. Trenin was the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. He was one of the people working in Western think tanks in Russia. By now, all of that is, of course, a thing of the past. Dmitry Trenin is now a research professor at the Higher School of Economics, but he is a brilliant analyst. The way in which his analysis is now turning darker and darker should really make us all think about where we are headed. I actually interviewed Dmitry Trenin together with Anatol Lieven, right, only three years ago. When Anatol wrote this piece, I reached out to him. This was one of my early roundtables and discussions. Dmitry Trenin, back then, three years ago, still conceptualized what was going on in the fashion of a new Cold War. That was his analysis back then: that this deterioration and this new confrontation— like all-out confrontation between Russia and the West—would resemble what happened in the Cold War. And please, if you're interested in it, go back. It's interesting to watch this video from three years ago. But things got worse from there, because by now Trenin is at the point where he -- 1 of 9 -- assesses that we are not looking at something that resembles the Cold War anymore. We're looking at something that rather resembles the 1940s. So, a hot shooting war. And of course, this makes utter sense from the Russian perspective, since they are actually engaged in direct warfighting, right? The United States and Europe are still at the stage where they are arming a proxy that then fights a war for them. But Russia is on the end where they themselves are fighting with their own troops and soldiers in one of the theaters that Trenin talks about. We will go into this article in just a moment. I just want to point out that you can read the article either on RT, but I don't recommend it because RT started something unfortunate. The original article by Trenin was published here in Russian, actually. So what you're seeing here on my screen is the translation software translating the original Russian-language article into English. And I recommend reading it like this, even though this translation is somewhat problematic and gets things wrong every once in a while. It is still better than reading it on Russia Today, because Russia Today started to take these articles from the Russian original and then run them through ChatGPT— not just to translate them, but also to shorten them, right? And to make a brief outline, because I think they want something like a thousand words or less. And then ChatGPT actually does what ChatGPT does, which is standardize everything. The hallmark of a ChatGPT-rewritten article is that you get everything in GPT language. And the most standard GPT thing in the world is to create that structure: "It's not A, it is B." And you find that all over the place. Here—sorry, just give me one minute to rant about this, because I think it's really bad. We need RT. We need RT to be good, and we need RT to publish substantial articles and also translate them, please. But if RT does this, it kind of destroys them. Here, look at this: "It's not because of its scale, it's because of the stakes. It's not just geopolitical, but ideological. What we are seeing are not temporary crises, but rolling conflicts. The war is no longer about occupation, but destabilization." Russians are portrayed not just as enemies, but as subhuman. This is what ChatGPT does. RT, if you're listening, stop doing that. Please do the hard work and actually have somebody shorten these articles if needed, or at least improve the prompts, because this is very hard to read—it becomes so sensationalistic and you lose quite a bit of the nuance that Mr. Trenin actually writes in his piece. So it's still better to read it in translation. So, basically, what is he talking about? It's very depressing overall. First of all, we're not looking at a Cold War scenario; we're looking at a Third World War scenario, because the theaters are now converging. And Mr. Trenin is saying that two of the theaters are already converging. One is Eastern Europe—I mean, the war in Ukraine, obviously. The war that NATO has said it wants to carry also directly into Russia has already been carried into Russia with attacks like those in Kursk, but apparently they want to do so on a much larger scale—not just pinprick attacks, but attacks like what we saw a -- 2 of 9 -- month ago, I think in July, when drones were shipped directly into Russia and launched from inside Russia in order to attack some of the country’s strategic bomber fleet, which is something we haven’ t seen before. But that is now becoming part of a pattern, Trenin says. That just shows how this Third World War that's already going on is being fought. It was the same way in which targets inside Iran were attacked, with the sneak attacks and the decapitation efforts of Israel—obviously with the support of the United States government—to overwhelm the system and then strike from the inside, from within Iran, directly through collaborating forces at the homes of scientists, generals, and people within the military realm of the country, trying to carry out these decapitation strikes. So just sneak attacks at strategic targets and people, in utter disregard of all the previously accepted rules of the game. Trenin is combining those and saying, of course, that we have these two theaters that are now already alight, and that we should not expect the Middle East to become better anytime soon. Trenin isn't saying this, but the war between Iran and Israel—the United States, or the West, and Iran—is obviously currently just in a stalemate or in a pause. This is obviously something that will continue and is part of this warfare structure that we are now inside, in which sometimes fighting is outright, sometimes it's covert, and sometimes it's just a question of time until the high kinetic violence restarts again. Because all three—the United States, Israel, and Iran—have an interest in having a short break. We see that after the 12-day war, the violence calmed down, but it will continue. And Trenin is saying that—I mean, look at what's going on in Lebanon and look at what's going on in Gaza. These are the ways in which the Third World War is being waged, and one inspires the other. In relation to Russia, Trenin is pointing out that the West was aiming at a strategic defeat of Russia at first, at least over the first two years of the warfare. And since this is not possible anymore, the West has switched to trying to undermine Russia over the long haul, to basically use Russia's strategy of waging attrition warfare against Ukraine and turn that against Russia—trying to have strategic attrition on Russia by drawing it out, making it a long war, making it a costly war, and carrying the war into Russia through terrorist attacks, sneak attacks, and attacks on individual personnel. And Trenin, very correctly I think, actually says that much of this strategy is built on the auto-dehumanization of the enemy. And he, of course, speaks about the Russians, right? Because Trenin, unlike most Western thinkers, is actually able to put himself in the shoes of the enemy and explain to the Russians how the Americans and the West in general are thinking about them. And I do think he does a very decent job with the analysis because, as he says, the West regards its enemies as subhuman, as not worthy of the basic standards of international humanitarian law and as the recipients of human rights, because they are not considered human by the West, right? This is how the West is treating Palestinians in Gaza. This is how the West is treating the Lebanese. And this is also how the West treated the war with Iran, right? -- 3 of 9 -- In which the West celebrated the killing of scientists, the killing of anyone linked to the political leadership of Iran, and even their families. And Trenin says so: look, these people are looking at us as subhumans, and they will kill us. They will kill any one of us because the entire war effort of the West is about winning over anyone who can pose an alternative model—not just of world affairs, but of being a civilization. In this article, he brings everything back to the West's need for hegemony, and he lumps them together—not incorrectly so—the Europeans and the Americans, as having basically the same basic goal. And of course, the Europeans are being subsumed, being the servants, being the satellites of the American empire—but being satellites because they share the same values and outlook on the world, which is that nothing short of complete dominance, hegemonic dominance of their worldview, is acceptable. And because Russia and also China represent a different civilizational approach to running humanity, or to being part of humanity, that in and of itself—the existence of those alternative approaches—becomes a mortal threat to the West. So Trenin expects that this war is a total war, a total war of these civilizations, and that the West will use any method available and choose any target it can find to achieve its goals. And this is why he doesn't think of it anymore as a Cold War, because in the Cold War, one of the hallmarks was that these two systems, although they hated each other, maintained a balance—a mutual recognition of coexistence, of alternative rival systems. And even though each system claimed it was better than the other, there was an understanding that you would not try to directly attack; you would attack through proxies. And there was strategic restraint when it came to the largest of all weapons—of course, the nuclear weapons. But now, this understanding is out the window. The West, through its attacks on strategic nuclear assets—the bombers—has basically said, "Look, this is not the same game anymore." We don't respect the old boundaries. And in this sense, what we are seeing here is now at least as dangerous as the Cuban Missile Crisis, if not more so, because the West is already gearing up. And you can see—Trenin also points out—that the current hot war that Russia is fighting is a war in Ukraine, and that preparations a