Advertisement
Outside In | It’s the year of living dangerously as risks rise and cooperation falls
- With prospects of a Trump 2.0 looming, the WTO zombified and experts warning of mega threats and a ‘polycrisis’, the absence of cooperation makes one fear the worst
Reading Time:4 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
2
Ian Bremmer, founder of consultancy Eurasia Group, which has just released its global risk report, does not mince his words: “2024. Politically it’s the Voldemort of years. The annus horribilis. The year that must not be named. I’d love to sugarcoat it, but I can’t: from a global political risk perspective, this is the most dangerous and uncertain year I’ve covered in my lifetime.”
Advertisement
Other forecasters’ expectations for the year might not be quite as literary, but appear universally grim. The World Economic Forum’s 2024 Global Risk Report echoed the gloom: 2024 has opened “against a backdrop of rapidly accelerating technological change and economic uncertainty, as the world is plagued by a duo of dangerous crises: climate and conflict”. It foresees things worsening in the decade ahead.
While economist Nouriel Roubini warns about mega threats and historian Adam Tooze talks of a “polycrisis”, Martin Wolf in the Financial Times captured the mood. “It is not so much that anything can happen. It is rather that a sizeable number of quite conceivable somethings might happen, possibly at much the same time,” wrote Wolf. “Ours is indeed a messy and unpredictable world.”
Wolf focuses on the “fragilities” across the world which, if untended, will enable this polycrisis to wreak harm on a scale not seen for almost a century.
He notes four fragilities that stick out: environmental, as we engage in “an irreversible experiment with the biosphere”; financial, as we juggle eye-watering debt while interest rates are rising sharply; domestic politics and the “democratic recession” that provides the backdrop for more than 60 elections this year; and geopolitical conflict, amid changes in relative economic power in the wake of China’s rise.
It is this last “fragility” which might, especially in view of the increasing possibility of Donald Trump resuming tenancy at the White House, be the most dangerous of all. Deteriorating US-China relations will destroy any possibility of the international cooperation essential in tackling every other risk and fragility.
Advertisement