Fears of global war are rising among the world’s security experts.

As US competition with China heats up and friction between Russia and NATO builds, 40% of experts polled for the Atlantic Council’s Global Foresight 2025 Survey believe there will be another world war involving a multifront conflict among great powers in the next decade.

Anxiety is particularly high around China-Taiwan tensions: 65% said they somewhat or strongly agree that China will attempt to retake Taiwan by force within the next decade, compared to 50% who said so in the survey released in 2024. A plurality — 45% — also signaled they believe Russia and NATO will likely engage in direct military conflict by 2035, up from 29% a year before.

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Global war fears rising among security experts: Survey

Global war fears are rising among experts around the world, with more than 40 percent expecting a new world conflict in the next decade, according to a survey released Wednesday.

The poll from the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security found that 40.5 percent of security experts across more than 60 countries think that by 2035, there will be a multifront war among the most powerful nations. Nearly 60 percent of those surveyed said the opposite.

If another world war breaks out, the use of nuclear weapons seems likely, the respondents said; about 48 percent of experts say they expect nuclear weapons to be utilized in the coming 10 years by at least one nation if a larger conflict breaks out, per the poll.

The potential fighting could also take place in space. Roughly 45 percent of the survey’s respondents expect a war that could, at least in some capacity, take place in space within the next decade.

The conflict will also likely have devastating consequences for the global economy. About 28 percent of experts said a war between major military nations would be the biggest “threat to global prosperity over the next ten years.” The only other threat that ranked higher was climate change, at nearly 30 percent, according to the survey.

Most of the experts, 65 percent, “somewhat or strongly” agreed that China will attempt to take over Taiwan within the next decade. About 24 percent disagreed with that assessment. In last year’s poll, 50 percent said Beijing would attempt a takeover the Taiwan, while 30 percent had the opposite opinion, the Atlantic Council noted.

“This growing awakening on the part of the United States and its allies can become the basis for a call to action for the populations, governments, and militaries of these countries,” Markus Garlauskas, the Scowcroft Center’s director of the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative, said in a statement.

“The United States has typically waited until war was thrust upon it before preparing comprehensively,” he added. “Now is the time to act, to prepare, ideally to deter such aggression, and to be ready to hold firm if deterrence fails and we face either a short, sharp war or a protracted one.”

Another 45 percent of security experts “somewhat or strongly” agreed that Russia and NATO countries could be in direct military combat within the next decade, an uptick from last year’s iteration of the survey, when 29 percent said the same thing.

The Scowcroft Center poll was conducted in November and early December 2024 among 357 respondents. The survey does not list a margin of error.

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