A War-Prevention Budget: The West’s Practical Plan to Make “World War III” Less Likely by 2028

At 3 a.m. on a winter watch, a radar operator on NATO’s eastern flank sees fast-moving blips skating toward a border—too close to be comforting, too ambiguous to dismiss. In another time, that moment might have ended with a routine log entry. Today it can trigger a chain of calls that ricochet from an operations room to a minister’s phone, while social media fills the silence with certainty and outrage. This is how modern catastrophe begins: not always with a deliberate decision to start a world war, but with an incident that outpaces understanding.

Politico.eu’s provocation—that Western countries “see World War III coming”—lands because it matches the shift ordinary people can feel in the air: higher defense budgets, bigger exercises, sharper language from leaders, and a quiet return of civil-defense thinking. Sweden has mailed millions of crisis pamphlets; Finland’s shelter system can house much of its population. Across NATO, procurement has surged and readiness has tightened. Yet there is a dangerous trap in preparing only to fight. Deterrence is necessary, but deterrence without “circuit breakers” can harden assumptions, accelerate arms races, and make every crisis feel like the first domino.

The most responsible response to a world that feels closer to the brink is to fund prevention with the same seriousness as rearmament—to build a war-prevention architecture designed for the realities of 2026: drones and sabotage, cyberattacks and undersea cables, multi-theater simultaneity, and leaders forced to decide at algorithmic speed.

The danger isn’t one flashpoint. It’s the linkage.

The Western public tends to picture World War III as a single explosion. Strategists worry more about a chain reaction across theaters.

In Europe, Russia’s war against Ukraine has turned NATO from a political alliance into something closer to an operational warfighting coalition. Incidents in the Black Sea and Baltic airspace carry the risk of miscalculation, and the Suwałki Gap—the narrow corridor between Poland and Lithuania separating Kaliningrad from Belarus—has become shorthand for how quickly a localized crisis could widen.

In the Indo-Pacific, China’s pressure on Taiwan has grown more overt, and its naval expansion has changed military arithmetic. Because the United States has treaty commitments to allies such as Japan and the Philippines, a Taiwan contingency would not stay “regional” for long—especially given Taiwan’s central role in advanced semiconductors.

In the Middle East, shipping disruptions and proxy dynamics keep Western forces tied down and alliances stressed, while energy and trade routes remain exposed.

What makes this era uniquely combustible is the linkage: a crisis in the Taiwan Strait reverberates through European markets and credibility; instability in the Middle East strains naval capacity; pressure in Europe tempts opportunism elsewhere. Multi-front simultaneity is not a think-tank fantasy—it is what planners now model precisely because the world’s systems are intertwined.

The key insight: treat escalation like an engineering problem—and fund the guardrails

The West has largely reached for the most familiar instrument: more defense spending. That matters; credibility prevents deliberate aggression. But the likeliest pathway to disaster is not a premeditated blitz. It is a misread signal: a collision at sea, a downed drone, a cyberattack that cripples a hospital network and is interpreted as prelude to war, a proxy strike whose authorship is contested while television studios demand immediate retaliation.

High-risk industries don’t prevent catastrophe with courage alone. They assume humans will err and build redundancies so mistakes don’t cascade. War prevention should be treated the same way: multiple layers, constantly tested, designed to slow the pace of escalation and widen leaders’ room for choice.

That means a deliberate “war-prevention budget”—political, financial, and institutional—alongside defense modernization. Some voices argue for a grand bargain backed by enormous investment, something Marshall Plan–sized that tries to trade verified restraint for economic incentives. Others warn that adversaries may pocket benefits without changing behavior, and argue the immediate priority is narrower: robust crisis-management mechanisms that function even amid hostility. The synthesis is not to choose one or the other, but to sequence them: build the circuit breakers first, then use them to make larger deals safer and more verifiable.

How it could unfold, step by step, beginning this year

In the first half of 2026, NATO and key partners should stand up a permanent, multinational Escalation Management Cell—less a new bureaucracy than an always-on “air-traffic control tower” for crises. It would combine diplomats, military officers, cyber incident responders, and intelligence liaisons so that when an incident occurs—an undersea cable cut, a port disrupted by malware, an aircraft close-pass—leaders receive a shared operating picture within hours. The goal is not to soothe; it is to clarify fast enough that rumor doesn’t become policy.

At the same time, Western governments should treat hotlines as infrastructure, not symbolism. A hotline that isn’t tested is a prop. Quarterly “fire-drill” exercises between relevant military commands—quietly conducted, not theatrically announced—create an off-ramp when domestic politics punishes restraint. In a crisis, minutes matter; so does the confidence that the line on the other end will be answered.

By late 2026 into 2027, the agenda must shift from communication to constraint: updated “rules of the road” for air, sea, drones, and electronic warfare. The original Cold War incident-prevention logic needs a modern rewrite for uncrewed systems and persistent jamming. In parallel, there should be an explicit push for cyber restraint around civilian infrastructure—not because adversaries are angels, but because ambiguity is lethal. The point is to define behavior that will be treated as escalatory, and to pair that clarity with proportional consequences that don’t automatically force a military response.

This is also the year to modernize the arms-control conversation that has frayed since the collapse of agreements like INF and the pressure on New START-era guardrails. A new strategic stability dialogue that eventually includes China will be slow and politically ugly. But even the act of negotiating imposes discipline; it forces states to describe intentions rather than guess at them.

None of this works if societies are brittle. So alongside these measures, 2026–2027 must be the era of civic resilience: hospitals hardened against ransomware, energy grids built with redundancy, ports and rail hubs stress-tested, emergency communications modernized. This is not militarism; it is continuity of life. Sweden and Finland have shown what seriousness looks like. Most Western capitals still lag.

Then, as these guardrails start to function, the West can attempt something more ambitious: an incentive-backed framework that channels money not only into munitions but into verifiable de-escalation. The precise scale is contested—some propose sums as high as a trillion dollars over five years, repurposing a slice of the defense spending surge into monitored stabilization, reconstruction, and risk-reduction capacity. Skeptics are right to demand hard verification and clear conditions. But the premise is sound: it is cheaper to buy down risk than to pay for a great-power war.

What success looks like by 2028: not peace parades, but non-events

Success will not feel cinematic. It will look like an incident that does not become a war.

A drone is downed near a border, and within two hours the Escalation Management Cell produces a common picture; within four hours a tested hotline confirms it was navigational failure, not a strike. A cyberattack hits a port; forensic channels quickly distinguish criminal extortion from state action before politicians rush to retaliate. A naval collision occurs; pre-agreed procedures compel both sides to pull back rather than “save face” through escalation. Markets wobble, but hospitals keep operating, the grid stays up, elections proceed, and panic finds less oxygen.

And over time, something subtle returns to democracies: not complacency, but control—the feeling that governments are not merely preparing to fight, but actively reducing the odds that their children will have to.

The call to action: refuse both denial and doom

Western leaders should stop talking about “World War III” as if it were weather—spotted on the horizon and endured. War is a sequence of choices made under pressure. The obligation of statesmanship in 2026 is to widen the space for better choices: more time to think, more ways to clarify intent, more resilience when adversaries—or accidents—try to shock societies into rashness.

Citizens have leverage here. Demand defense budgets that include prevention, not as an afterthought but as a line item: crisis-management infrastructure, staffed diplomacy, resilient grids and hospitals, and transparent public communication that tells the truth without theatrical fear. Ask not only whether armies are stronger, but whether leaders have built the guardrails that keep mistakes from becoming annihilation.

Politico’s warning does not have to be prophecy. The West can prepare without sleepwalking, deter without cornering itself, and compete without turning every spark into a firestorm. The future hinges on whether we fund the unglamorous machinery of restraint—before the next 3 a.m. blip becomes history’s point of no return.