Photo – Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash
December 30, 2023
”It is difficult to make predictions, particularly about the future.”
Unknown but wise person’s statement.
I do not pretend my predictions below are scientific or based on a sophisticated social science methodology. They are merely intuitive and hypothetical and based on some of my accumulated knowledge and experience about international affairs over more than four decades.
You may say they grow out of a Wright Mills-like sociological – and peace research – imagination.
I regret I can’t mobilise more optimism at this point in world history. I hope, therefore, that many of these predictions will turn out to be wrong. But keep or archive them.
Time will tell.
(1) The war on Gaza will continue, probably for months or years, and the worldwide anger directed at Israel will increase exponentially. Israel will be more and more isolated and attacked in various ways.
(2) The genocide is likely to spark a larger warfare in the Middle East, involving Syria, Iran, Yemen and possibly others.
(3) The US and other West will lose further influence in the Middle East.
(4) There will be more terrorism against the West because it has stood by Israel and done nothing to prevent or stop the genocide.
(5) Anti-semitism will increase – and Israel will continue to absurdly argue that criticism of Israel’s government, of the Zionist state of the Jewish people, is anti-semitism.
(6) There will be more refugees. There will, grossly speaking, be nothing for the Palestinians to return home to. And the world’s humanitarian aid system will not be able to handle the more than 110 million already forcibly displaced people worldwide.
(7) The ill-considered EU sanctions on Russia, together with the US destruction of the Nord Stream, will create growing socio-economic problems for everyone in Europe, the poorest in particular.
(8) There will either never be an explanatory report on who destroyed Nord Stream, or there will be some fake report stating it was X, Y or Z, so we shall understand that it was not the United States.
(9) There will be more social unrest in Europe when prices reach a certain level and/or shop shelves begin to empty.
(10) The right-wing to semi-fascist parties in Europe will gain ground.
(11) The crisis in Germany’s economy and politics will deepen, and Chancellor Olaf Scholz will (have to) resign.
(12) The NATO membership for Sweden and Finland and the bilateral US-forced military agreements with them and Denmark will prove disastrous in terms of costs, lowered security and local dissatisfaction with the presence of thousands of US soldiers under US jurisdiction, not that of the host country.
(13) President Zelensky will be replaced with or without violence by a combination of an internal “Putsch” and the US dropping him. Ukraine will fight into 2024 but has already – predictably – lost the war, which does not necessarily mean Russia has won. Then, a post-war settlement of accounts and a blame game will commence. Civil war?
(14) The relations between Russia, a European country too, and the European Union and the US will remain bad for decades or generations ahead. Russia is turning away from the West and joining the Rest.
(15) There is likely to be some kind of security (not peace) negotiations after a stalemate and ceasefire. NATO’s misuse of Ukraine and Russia’s invasion have destroyed, once and for all, much of what was once Ukraine.
(16) Reforming and rebuilding a diminished and destroyed Ukraine will take decades. Ukraine will disappear from the front pages because more important things will happen worldwide, and the US, NATO and the EU want us all to forget their Himalayan mistake in Ukraine. Europe will send back Ukrainians to an insecure future.
(17) NATO will suffer a major intellectual and moral blow from having tried to get Ukraine into NATO and, when that went madly wrong, using Ukraine as a proxy to weaken Russia. NATO will continue to talk about Ukraine as a NATO member, but it will be empty words.
(18) NATO will show more and more serious political cracks in the aftermath of the Ukraine quagmire, because of Gaza and because European elites will face a gun-versus-butter conflict with the citizens.
(19) So will the EU – until both have dissolved. The fragmentation will accelerate markedly in 2024. We may witness a crisis of leadership, management and visionlessness of unique proportions.
(20) The US will let Europe pay the bills for the Ukraine disaster and the attempted re-building of Ukraine. There will be less and less cohesion over the Atlantic – and that will be blamed on the conspiring, conniving Russians and Chinese and their disinformation.
(22) The West will continue throwing money out of the window for more re-armament, undermining its socio-economic and cultural development.
(23) The West will also display ever more every malfunctioning; trains that don’t depart and arrive on time; technical and management failures in a series of sectors, social services and the health sectors will take hard hits, state bureaucracies will malfunction too, for instance, the handing of refugees. There will be a marked trend towards what people in Europe sarcastically call the future ’banana republic’ status.
(24) The Rest – 85% of humanity – will continue to rise and turn its back on The West, the 15%, and US/European leadership will decrease rapidly. The US Empire will continue to decline and fall, if not in 2024, very soon thereafter. Western values, like human rights, will be considered hypocritical after the West has stood by the Israeli government’s genocide.
(25) If Biden wins, there will be more war, weapons addiction, militarist thinking, confrontation, interventionism, arms trade, and more bases around the world. The domestic economy will suffer proportionately. The relations with the EU and China will become worse. Both Ukraine and Israel weigh heavily on his chances to get elected.
(26) If Trump wins, there will be more focus on domestic matters, and he is likely to tone down militarism and stop wars (he did not start any new during his term); he’ll probably try to mend ties with Russia and signal a low commitment to NATO. On the other hand, he is likely to divide the US society even further – to the point of risking a mild-to-serious form of civil war.
(27) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stands for qualified new and anti-militarist thinking about the US and its role in the world (except when it comes to his remarkably wrong-headed, almost blind pro-Israel views), but as an independent candidate in the US’ stale political structure, he will hardly be elected.
(28) Although at a somewhat lower pace, China will continue its amazing socio-economic development – which is good for the world economy and the 140+ countries now involved in the Belt & Road Initiative, BRI.
(29) It will continue to be innovative and do things in ways different from the West. It will also prepare systematically for getting by without much interaction with the West should the West continue its Cold War attitude instead of cooperating with China – collective self-reliance with The Rest.
(30) To the extent the US continues to violate all earlier agreements with China concerning Taiwan (even back to the Chou Enlay-Nixon Document) – i.e. that Taiwan is China – including the de facto and de jure One-China Policy, the risk of some Chinese pre-emptive military action to secure Taiwan within China’s sovereignty will increase. The United States and its allies will continue not to respect the fact that they have nothing to do in this region.
(31) Western democracy as we have known it for decades – relatively free media, lively public discussions, appreciation of the diversity of views and true democratic decision-making based on informed debate and taking minorities particularly into account – will fade even further and more rapidly.
(32) Thus, the West will continue its move towards more authoritarianism in 2024 and – therefore – speed up its psycho-political projections, telling its citizens that other countries are dictatorships and pose a threat to ’us’.
(33) US, NATO and EU foreign policy will continue to be based not on facts, analyses and long-term thinking but on narratives produced to fit agendas already made up by elites. That implies more ’boomerangs’ or ‘blowbacks’ due to unwise, panic decisions where ’we send signals’ that virtually nobody cares to listen to anymore.
(34) Urgent world problems – poverty, infrastructure, climate, and environment will get woefully little attention and resources compared with militarism’s ever-increasing demands on shrinking civilian economies.
(35) Nuclear weapons states will continue to develop their arsenals despite the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (2021) and the ethical fact that every government that possesses nuclear weapons must be deemed to adhere to the central element of terrorism, namely the killing of innocent human beings to achieve some political goal. Nuclear weapons simply cannot be used without killing thousands or millions of innocent people and will, therefore, never be used in defence on the territories of nuclear weapons states but only offensively on an opponent’s territory.
(36) The year 2024 will likely confirm – if it hasn’t already – how meaningless it is to learn about the larger world through the Western mainstream media, including state-financed public service. There will be more FOSI: Fake + Omission + Source Ignorance than ever. Instead, we must all use the Internet and its wide variety of sources, angles, selections, backgrounds and stories and then shape our own opinions.
(37) Finally, let’s remember that things will happen and cause chain reactions that we cannot predict – the kind of small ”black swans” that can lead to large changes. Part of the future is and remains unpredictable or filled with surprises. Also, good surprises – like, imagine that China or some other nuclear weapons power would declare that it is taking the first small steps towards reducing its nuclear arsenals because it has decided to become legal and respect the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons from 2021 that is legally binding and makes it illegal to develop, test, produce, acquire, possess, stockpile, use or threaten to use nuclear weapons.
