What Actually Mattered This Week: Top Risks 2024

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WHAT ACTUALLY MATTERED THIS WEEK

Eurasia Group’s Top Risks for 2024

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.

Top Risks?is Eurasia Group's annual forecast of the political risks that are most likely to play out over the course of the year. As I wrote in this year’s report, three wars will dominate world affairs: Russia vs. Ukraine, now in its third year; Israel vs. Hamas, now in its third month; and the United States vs. itself, ready to kick off at any moment.

Fully one-third of the global population?will go to the polls?this year, but an unprecedentedly dysfunctional US election will be by far the most consequential for the world’s security, stability, and economic outlook. The outcome will affect the fate of 8 billion people, and only 160 million Americans will have a say in it, with the winner to be decided by just tens of thousands of voters in a handful of swing states. The losing side – whether Democrats or Republicans – will consider the outcome illegitimate and be unprepared to accept it.

The world’s most powerful country faces critical challenges to its core political institutions: free and fair elections, the peaceful transfer of power, and the checks and balances provided by the separation of powers. With the outcome of the vote essentially a coin toss (at least for now), the only certainty is continued damage to America’s social fabric and international standing. The political state of the union … is troubled indeed.?

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TRUTHS, DAMNED TRUTHS, AND STATISTICS

It’s going to be a challenge for Xi to reverse this one…

- Visual Capitalist

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THE GZERO WORLD WE’RE JUST LIVING IN

THE GRAPHIC TRUTH

GZERO LIVE

From Donald Trump's perspective, what was the biggest mistake of his first term? Appointing folks who turned out to be establishmentarians might be a strong candidate, according to Susan Glasser, staff writer at The New Yorker and co-author of "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021."

Based on over 300 interviews with people intimately familiar with Trump's first experience in the White House, she expects a second term will differ in tone and tactics. One source even likened it to the infamous scene in 1993's "Jurassic Park" in which velociraptors learn to open doors.

"That is a pretty scary moment when a very senior US national security official tells you that that's what's going to be happening in Trump's second term," she said while discussing the subject with GZERO in a livestream discussion on January 8 about Eurasia Group's Top Risks for 2024. "Take it seriously."

Watch the full livestream discussion, Cliff Kupchan, Susan Glasser, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, Marietje Schaake, Evan Solomon, and yours truly, on GZERO Media’s website here.

WORLD IN 60

How will the upcoming Taiwan presidential election affect its relationship with both the United States and China?

With Israel conducting airstrikes in Lebanon, is an expanded war in the Middle East inevitable?

Find out in this week’s World in 60 Seconds!

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BECAUSE THE INTERNET

We accidentally released our Top Risks report on the Supreme Leader’s 40th birthday this year…sorry Kim, you only barely made the list.

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WHAT TO READ THIS WEEK

Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah’s Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel

To understand the risk of a wider Middle East war, we need to better understand Hezbollah and its never-ending hidden war with Israel. No foreigner has burrowed more deeply inside that complex group and understands its drives and limits like journalist Nicholas Blanford. His book, Warriors of God, is a must-read for right now. ?

DEEP THOUGHTS

“Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.” – Thomas Jefferson

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Thanks for reading!?Please subscribe to GZERO Daily for coverage on global politics. And make sure to read my latest book?The Power of Crisis?for a roadmap of this decade's great crises and how they might help us build a better world.

I am president of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media and foreign affairs columnist at TIME. I currently teach at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and previously was a professor at New York University. You can follow me on?X, Threads,?Facebook, and?Instagram.