Two months later, the NATO Secretary General, the UK’s Chief of Defence Staff, and the new head of MI6 each delivered the same stark warning
Khaled Hassan | The Grand Strategy | Dec 16, 2025
My tweet with the warning on 3 October 2025
We are watching history repeat itself in the most jarring and, frankly, frightening way imaginable.
The pattern is tragically familiar. A period of peril, a belated and forceful response, followed by a victorious but fleeting peace that breeds complacency.
After standing against fascism, the West believed its work was done. After prevailing in the Cold War, it declared history over. Each time, the dream of a forever-peaceful Europe has been shattered by Russian revanchism, Iranian belligerence, transnational terrorism, and, most recently, Chinese hostility.
Now, on the brink of 2026, Europe is relearning its oldest, hardest lesson. Peace is temporary, not an inevitable destiny.
Adversaries perpetually watch for the moment our guard drops, and the cost of that lapse is always paid in the most precious currency: the blood of our sons and daughters.
What makes this historical cycle more dangerous today is not merely the recurrence of the threat, but its fundamental transformation. We are not simply heading toward another war, we are living in the tense, ambiguous preamble to one that may never be formally declared.
This new reality has now been defined, in chilling unison, by the West’s foremost security leaders. In early December, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warned that Russia could attack a NATO country within five years and that Europe “must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured”. Just days later, on 15 December, the UK’s new Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, Blaise Metreweli, used her first public speech to describe a world where the West is “now operating in a space between peace and war”, a permanent grey zone where Russia “is testing us… with tactics that are just below the threshold of war”.
On the very same day, the UK’s Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, delivered the military’s bluntest assessment in a generation. He stated plainly that “the situation is more dangerous than I have known during my career, and the price of peace is rising”, and warned that the nation’s “sons and daughters” need to be ready to fight.
This convergence of warnings is unprecedented. It is a campaign of constant, simmering pressure where aggression is fragmented, deniable, and relentless. Cyberattacks that cripple hospitals, drone swarms probing NATO airspace, sophisticated sabotage of undersea cables, and industrial-scale disinformation that erodes public trust. The objective is no longer solely territorial conquest. It is to “bully, fearmonger and manipulate”, to hollow out our resilience, test our unity, and exhaust our will. The battlefield, as the intelligence chief made clear, is now “from sea to space, from the battlefield to the boardroom”. The Spy Chief makes it perfectly clear, “the front line is everywhere”, in our digital networks, our energy supplies, and our collective psyche.
This is brilliant!!! I truly empathize with his frustrations. But it does seem to me that given his attitude in his other writings (contained in the full article) that I may be on the correct path when I joke (?) about being somewhat to the right of Attila the Hun.