Predicting 2024: All the Possibilities We Cannot See
What's unpredictable about the New Year matters way more than what the experts say they foresee.
In the news business “year in review” features are hearty perennials. Marquee name professors, think tankers, and former ‘this’s and that’s’ join the punditocracy, laying out the forces that will shape events and their annual predictions. It would take an intrepid editor to change the format, but if this year’s pronouncements don’t include a bold face disclaimer about 2024’s unpredictability, deleting-before-reading or changing the channel is worth considering.
2024 promises a bumper crop of uncertainty and explaining why that’s the case merits significant space in print and on air. Expertise isn’t required to list what makes things so unpredictable. An election with an indicted former President touting his dictatorial ambitions; a Congress half-paralyzed by far-right extremists; a border crisis of epic proportions; wars in Europe and the Middle East and a truculent China, all evoking growing angst among US allies; and global threats such as climate change, to name just a few.
The task of predicting what may happen in each case, however, isn’t what makes for the forecasting black hole. It’s the unforeseeable interplay of events as they unfold and their equally unpredictable consequences. Take another “stolen” election with day-after legal challenges coast-to-coast. Or presidential candidates who fail to win an Electoral College majority. Add metastasizing crises in Ukraine and Gaza. Then fold in allies hedging their bets. In Moscow, London, Paris, Tokyo, Beijing, and Seoul as well as Washington who knows how or where the chips will fall?
For Americans, of course, the greatest uncertainty begins at home. To be sure, a variety of scholars are reassuring, despite 2024’s potential perils. The democracy, they argue, has faced formidable challenges, and overcome. The demagoguery of Hughie Long and Father Coughlin, left- and right-wing populists respectively, confronted Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression and as World War II loomed, while the Supreme Court short-circuited Richard Nixon’s Watergate machinations, making clear no President is above the law.
In any case, the uncertainties aren’t inhibiting the foreign policy crowd from presenting its New Year prescriptions. Foreign Affairs this month is a case in point. The journal features a slate of articles admonishing America’s elected leaders to pull up their socks and step out strategically. The call to arms couldn’t be clearer: take on a recidivist Russia, a rising China, and stiffening global economic competition, or face an atrophying US role in a far more threatening world.
The recommendations are a worthy blueprint—at least for a notional White House. Who can argue with rejecting “decline-ism,” reasserting postwar leadership, striking a comprehensive border deal, or reforming malfunctioning rules that govern international trade? Quality ideas or not, however, in 2024’s circumstances the proposals would require the next President to join Marty McFly in Doc Brown’s plutonium-powered, time-traveling DeLorean and head Back to the Future if he or she has any hope of carrying them out.
That the experts aren’t addressing the source of the uncertainty affecting their field—the crater in Washington where the political consensus on the US world role once stood—isn’t a surprise. After all, whether the 8thCentury’s English monks heard the commotion or not, they, too, probably stayed in their lane illuminating manuscripts as the Vikings came over the monastery’s walls. When it comes to examining 2024’s unpredictability, foreign policy specialists also aren’t alone in ignoring the figurative as well as literal elephant in the room.
Consider the news coverage of the political battle over military aid to Ukraine. For months reporters have ably presented the play-by-play—the Republicans’ linkage to the border crisis, the Democrats’ disarray over tougher immigration rules, and despite Kyiv’s increasingly dire needs, the gamesmanship that has kicked the can into the new year. As for the impact on Ukraine, US allies and Vladimir Putin? The consequences of the impasse have received bare mention in print and on air, if any at all.
Do American audiences need to understand what 2024’s unpredictability may mean for the risks facing the country? The fact that Europe’s foreign policy experts are analyzing in detail the possibility of a dramatically different, and diminished US international role suggests one answer: indeed, they do.
Writing last May about the prospects of a second Trump administration, a trio of policy analysts at the European Council on Foreign Relations advised it was time for the continent’s leaders to face the possibilities. “European diplomats may be tempted to rush to find common ground (with a Trump administration) … filtering out the uncomfortable messages. Instead, Europeans needs to listen closely to US foreign policy debates and believe what the candidates say.”
Paying attention, the trio argues, is important to prepare for policy changes, and not only in Ukraine.
“These include the abandonment of international cooperation on climate action and renewable energy; disdain for international institutions and the liberal democratic order; lower tolerance for shortcomings in European military capabilities and strategy; greater affection for populist conservatives such as Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban; and a more transactional approach towards traditional allies in Europe that will result in higher levels of coercion and stronger linkages between policy areas.”
Is digging into the uncertainties worth the ink or the airtime? Ask the Europeans. Their exploration of what makes 2024 unpredictable is already well underway.
Sadly, as the reservoir of “news” outlets has spread exponentially, it has gotten shallower
while the issues -- a multipolar world, AI, global warming, public health, wealth gaps -- have grown more complex.