Last week on FP Live, columnist Stephen Walt looked back at the most important trends and developments in 2023. His next assignment is significantly tougher: predicting how global events will play out in 2024.
Last week on FP Live, columnist Stephen Walt looked back at the most important trends and developments in 2023. His next assignment is significantly tougher: predicting how global events will play out in 2024.
FP subscribers can watch the full video interview in the box atop this page. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript.
Ravi Agrawal: What is the most underweighted risk for 2024? In other words, what should we be worried about that we aren’t already?
Stephen Walt: One is the possibility of a significant escalation in the Middle East conflict. The good news is that so far none of the bystanders and third parties in the region have seemed very enthusiastic about getting involved. There’s been a little bit of conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. The Houthis have fired some rockets. But in general, everyone seems to want to keep this limited and confined.
If the conflict continues—and this may go on for months—the ability or the willingness of most of the regional powers to stay on the sidelines may deteriorate. If you get a serious war between Israel and Hezbollah, and if that forces Iran to get more actively involved—which, of course, then drags the United States in on Israel’s side—you suddenly have a regional conflict of the sort we haven’t really seen in decades, if ever.
RA: How do you see things playing out between the Israelis and the Palestinians over the next few months? What do you think things might look like one year from now?
SW: Unfortunately, I think things are not going to look that different a year from now. By then, the act of violence will be over. There will be some kind of cease-fire or an end to the Israeli campaign in Gaza. Gaza will have been largely destroyed. So this is going to be a humanitarian crisis of enormous proportions, and that’s not going to end within a year or so.
The fundamental problem—the political problem of how Israelis and Palestinians will coexist in this geographic space—will not have been resolved a year from now. In a sense, we will have kicked the can down the road. I don’t think you’ll see a shift in the Israeli government to suddenly say, “Now we’re in favor of genuinely pursuing a two-state solution.” I don’t think you’re going to see a reformed and newly empowered Palestinian Authority. I don’t think you’re going to see Hamas eliminated. You may even see Hamas more popular both in Gaza and the West Bank than it was before as a symbol of Palestinian resistance. The depressing news here is, a year from now, when we have this conversation, that issue will be just as intractable and unresolved as it is today.
RA: What about Israel’s potential deal to normalize ties with Saudi Arabia?
SW: The fighting has put that on hold for the moment, but I don’t think it has eliminated it as a possibility over the longer term because the incentives the different actors had for the deal haven’t gone away. In the American case, the primary incentive was actually not related to the Israeli-Arab conflict. We were trying to broker some kind of security arrangement with Riyadh to keep them on our side in a period where Saudi Arabia was at least flirting to some degree with China. The way to get that through the American political system was to link it to normalization with Israel. That incentive, to continue to keep Saudi Arabia within the American security orbit and not have it realign with China, hasn’t gone away.
The Saudis want to get the best deal they possibly can and would love to get a security guarantee from the United States. The Israelis would love to have the symbolic achievement of a normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia. I imagine that possibility coming back. The question is how quickly it comes back—and that may depend a lot on how the conflict goes and how it plays out with Arab populations.
RA: What is your sense of how the anger over Gaza might impact dynamics in the Middle East—and also the United States?
SW: Arab opinion has always been more confrontational and certainly less sympathetic to Israel than the attitudes or policies of many of their governments. Most notably in Egypt, which eventually cut a peace deal with Israel. The Israeli government and the Egyptian government have basically been jointly maintaining the lid on Gaza for years now. That’s very much at odds with the opinions of many Egyptian citizens. And that’s true not just in Saudi Arabia but a number of the Gulf states as well, probably most visibly in Jordan.
This highlights a deep tension for the United States, where on the one hand we say we’re in favor of democracy and that people ought to govern, but we recognize that when it comes to the Middle East, if the people were actually in charge and shaping policy or even had a louder voice over what those policies would be, the positions of many of those governments would be quite different.
RA: Is there an event you’re marking on your calendar as one to watch in 2024?
SW: Yes: the 75th anniversary of NATO. This is going to be happening, though, with two shadows being cast over it. One is that the war in Ukraine will not be going well—and this will be seen as a failure of the alliance. The second dark cloud is the possible reelection of Donald Trump, who cast doubts about NATO’s future and has no love for it or the European Union.
RA: One of the frameworks through which to look at 2024 is that it’s the year more people will go to the polls than any other year in history. And the year will begin with the Taiwanese elections in January. If the incumbent pro-independence party is reelected, that could spark off a whole range of tensions on the Taiwan Strait and reverse some of the recent constructive dialogue between the United States and China.
SW: The outcome there is going to be very important. The incumbent candidate of the ruling Democratic People’s Party has been outspoken on the subject of independence in the past. He has been moderating his statements of late. So, there’s been an attempt to step back from pushing the prospect of independence. The message he has gotten consistently from the United States and from others is that even if he is successful in the election, given that the opposition is largely divided, the last thing he should do upon taking office is to do something that might force China to take actions that would be tremendously destabilizing in the region.
I think a year from now, the status quo will still be prevailing there. But it’s certainly an election we want to watch and an aftermath we want to pay very close attention to.
RA: Another big election coming up in the first half of the year is India. India’s foreign policy has been much more muscular over the last few years. How do you see that developing over the course of 2024?
SW: I think Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi is going to be overwhelmingly reelected and that will reinforce the policy positions he’s taken at home and abroad. It shows you the emerging character of an increasingly multipolar world where, as India becomes more powerful, it adopts a more independent stance in a variety of ways. Yes, it wants to be close to the United States, for balancing China, but it also has a close relationship with Russia because that gets it cheap energy and helps the Indian economy. The fact that there’s a tension between those two goals is just a sign of how politics works when you have a number of different competing powers. This is something the United States has to get used to.
RA: Indonesia’s another big election in 2024. Any thoughts on the broader ramifications of how the world should think about this big Muslim-majority country in Southeast Asia that has more than 200 million people but rarely gets enough attention in the global press?
SW: We should be thinking more carefully about what Indonesia’s trajectory is going to be precisely because of its size and its economic growth. It’s going to become a more consequential player over time. If the United States and others are really focused on the balance of power in Asia, how Indonesia decides to orient itself could be really significant.
RA: When you think about all of the elections coming up in 2024, what worries you the most?
SW: As an American, what worries me the most is the outcome of the election in November 2024. I don’t think that we’re going to see technology exerting a profound effect on the next cycle of elections. The ability of social media and AI to affect those things, I think, is still pretty limited. But I’m worried about the degree of polarization in the United States that it makes it impossible for nations to agree on the same set of facts.
A trend of 2023 that we all ought to be happy about is that inflation seems to have actually been tamed in the United States and that the American economy is by almost all measures doing remarkably well. Yet most Americans don’t think that’s the case. People are now getting their information only from sources that they already agree with. That, I think, worries me in almost all of these contexts—the tendency for opinion now to be concentrated and siloed to the point that we all know what we believe. What we forget is what we believe probably isn’t the full story, because we’re never hearing alternative perspectives.
RA: Let’s talk some more about the 2024 U.S. elections. What are the stakes for the world if we have Biden 2.0 or Trump 2.0?
SW: Biden 2.0 will be mostly continuity. You’re not going to see dramatic changes. If Biden is reelected, you will see the United States begin moving much more directly to trying to negotiate a settlement to the war in Ukraine. They are not going to want to admit that Ukraine can’t win before the election, but afterward, I think they’re going to be interested in cutting a deal. If Trump is elected, the movement to distance ourselves from Ukraine and basically force them to cut whatever deal they can will be almost immediate.
In Asia, the two are going to be the same. Trump was very worried about China, and the Biden administration has continued and if anything doubled down on some of Trump’s policies toward China, albeit in a more targeted way. Biden has been very effective in trying to organize alliances in Asia. Trump would not dismantle those alliances; he’ll just be a more difficult person for them all to deal with. It’s going to be a bumpier ride in Asia, but America’s major commitments are going to be preserved because they’re all about China.
Europe is the region that ought to be really worried. Trump has no love lost for the European Union. He thinks NATO may be obsolete as well. If I were a European leader, I would start hedging a lot against the possibility of a Trump presidency.
RA: If Trump is elected, are there any guardrails that other countries can rely on?
SW: One guardrail is that other countries can join forces to try to oppose or limit what the United States does. The United States is very powerful, but it is not supreme. In economics and in a whole variety of other arenas, you do need some cooperation from the rest of the world.
The other guardrails are the ones that exist within the U.S. system of government, and those actually put real limits on what Trump was able to do in the first term. The establishment put real constraints on the things he accomplished. They learned that he had a short attention span. My concern is that some of that will be impossible in the second term because they’ve learned from the experience of the first term and they’re going to try to get much greater control over the bureaucracy.
RA: Last question. What’s the trajectory of U.S.-China relations in 2024?
SW: I think both the United States and China have a real interest in not having that relationship deteriorate dramatically over the next year. The United States has its hands full now dealing with Ukraine and the Gaza war. The last thing we need is a crisis emerging somewhere in Asia while all these other things are happening.
Similarly, the Chinese economy is not doing well. The internal disarray within the Chinese government has clearly preoccupied [Chinese President] Xi Jinping. The tensions that China has had with other countries have complicated their relations. They’ve been trying to make up with other countries in Asia, and certainly with Europeans. Both sides have an incentive to keep this competition somewhat muted for the next year or so.
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