2024: What’s the Worst That Could Happen?

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DW News: A global battle of political systems is underway.

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DW News: 2024's election bonanza kicked off in January in Taiwan. 

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Channel 4 News: Outside of Israel and Gaza, we've seen attacks in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen just over the course of this weekend.

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DW News: 2023 was the hottest year on record. Scientists warned that this year could very well be even hotter.

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New York Post: China's hackers are positioning on American infrastructure... 

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WION: The Kim Jong Un regime is showing off its increasingly diverse nuclear... 

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60 Minutes: What's coming? Again, artificial intelligence.

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CNN: Migrants crossing the southern U.S. border are once again reaching record levels…

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Global News: Stop the steal, stop the steal… 

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The Economist: What else will the next 12 months bring?

The country’s experts on foreign policy and national security usually have a world of outside threats to keep them occupied. But this year a group of analysts surveyed by CFR have sounded the biggest alarm about something bubbling up at home - political violence around this year’s presidential election. They have also flagged the prospects of a surge in migration at the southwest U.S. border as a leading concern. And while both are scenarios playing out, rather unusually, on U.S. soil, they have consequences for the rest of the world. 

To help sort through these and other worries, we turn to Paul Stares. Paul is a CFR senior fellow and director of the Center for Preventive Action, which runs a yearly survey of global threats and priorities.

I’m Gabrielle Sierra and this is Why It Matters. Today, what to worry about in 2024.

Gabrielle SIERRA: So Paul, this isn’t the first time that we’ve had you on Why It Matters, you joined us last year to go over the top threats for 2023. But new year, new threats, so let’s kick it off. What are the top concerns for 2024?

Paul B. STARES: So In terms of the top priorities this year or risks, the first is the likelihood of growing political polarization in the United States, which leads to potential acts of domestic terrorism, political violence, particularly around the upcoming presidential election. The second concern was an expansion or escalation of the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. And the third ranked concern this year is the surge in immigration toward the southwest border of the United States. And some are already moving in the direction of what people were concerned or anticipated at the end of 2023.

These top priorities are all high impact, high probability contingencies - and having three of them on the report in one year is unprecedented. So let's go through them one at a time, beginning with domestic terrorism and political violence here in the United States.

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VICE News: Stop protecting tyrants

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MSNBC: We turn now to the 2024 presidential race

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PBS NewsHour: You mention the issue of political violence, the language is careless.

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TODAY: If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.

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The Independent: I’m telling you, if Pence caved, we’re going to drag [expletive] through the streets. [expletive] politicians are going to get dragged through the streets. 

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Times Radio: You know the risk of something much much worse than January the 6 I think is quite high. 

SIERRA: Yikes.

STARES: Yikes, indeed. So this is the first year that we have included a domestic conflict related contingency. Prior years we've only ever included foreign threats or overseas or foreign-sourced concerns. But when we did the solicitation of what to include, it was the overwhelming top concern in this year's preventive priorities survey.

SIERRA: I mean it must have been really top of mind if domestic issues rarely make the list.

STARES: I think just the level of polarization over the last four or five years has definitely increased in the United States. Obviously January 6th is in people's minds, the storming of the Capitol in 2020. And a lot of people worry about how this growing polarization could really lead to acts of political violence. And here I'm talking about potential assassination of candidates, possible terrorist acts at the conventions, disruption of the voting procedures, possibly again a sort of January 6th-like disruption of the counting and then the actual outcome being properly accredited at the end of this whole process. So this could go on throughout essentially 2024, well into 2025.

SIERRA: So what can we do about it? 

STARES: We could try to reduce the risk of candidates, if not deliberately then inadvertently, inciting their supporters to engage in violence. We can take extra security precautions around known events, the primaries obviously, and beef up the security for the candidates, beef up the security around events like the conventions, polling stations and so on.

SIERRA: We see how big of a deal this is for us, but a domestic issue is at home, so why should anyone outside of the U.S. even care about this? 

STARES: I think it's worth taking a time out just to think about what are the foreign policy implications of growing political violence or polarization in the U.S.? And I think you can imagine there are several concerns in the minds of foreign policy experts. Obviously they're concerned about the threat to life and liberty at home, but I think they're probably also worried that foreign actors, foreign adversaries could try to foment more divisions, more divisiveness within the U.S. and through disinformation, social media, fake news, they could sort of whip up even further unrest and potential violence in the U.S. I think another concern is that if this were to happen, the U.S. could be just distracted by this. And other actors might take advantage who see the U.S. just got their hands full at home, and so they do things abroad again against U.S. interests. Another probable concern is for many years, the U.S. has been a big promoter of democracy and human rights around the world. We've advocated for peaceful elections and the orderly transfer of power, and it's going to be damn hard for the U.S. to advocate for all those things if we essentially can't keep the peace at home. And so as I've argued in many respects, conflict prevention is now going to have to begin at home if we want to try to be effective abroad. 

SIERRA: Yeah. Like how can we set an example, how could we tell people how to run their country -

STARES: Precisely. We've been doing this for years. We've encouraged international organizations to develop handbooks to manage elections, and when we can't sort of do it in a peaceful, orderly process, it really undercuts the credibility of the message, frankly.

Sidenote, if you are interested in diving further into how we got into this phase in the first place, there is a great book out by two of my CFR colleagues, Jacob Ware and Bruce Hoffman. It’s called God, Guns, and Sedition: Far Right Terrorism in America. Yes the title promises a lot and the book delivers. You should check it out.

SIERRA: I get that this is very very scary and it’s something we need to prevent, but I do still wonder how foreign policy experts compared something like this to the great power threats on the list? 

STARES: It's really hard. Obviously, I don't think one can compare acts of terrorism at home, certainly if it's relatively low level or random, and it's contained afterwards with the possibility of escalation between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, which could conceivably lead to major power conflict and even the use of nuclear weapons. They're two quite different possibilities. But for the U.S. to be distracted at this time for there to be major sort of violent divisions within the U.S., this could kind of resonate in extremely unwelcome ways around the world. So I don't want to underestimate or underrate the risk that comes from domestic terrorism and political violence in the U.S. because it really is a serious threat.

And so foreign policy experts think one of the biggest threats in the year ahead is actually at home. 

Let’s move on to the next of the top three threats, the escalation of war in the Middle East.

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PBS NewsHour: The U.S. priority since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack has been preventing violence from expanding across the region. 

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CNN: New strikes on Iranian backed militants far from Israel's borders, stoking fears that the United States is on the brink of a wider war in the Middle East.

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WGN News: President Biden is vowing to respond after an Iranian-backed drone strike.

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WGN News: Three American troops killed and at least thirty-four more injured today.

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TODAY: Today in this region, U.S. allies from Bahrain to Egypt are warning of further instability while condemning what they're calling a terrorist attack. 

SIERRA: Can you explain a bit more about this idea of wider regional conflict?

STARES: Yeah, so when the survey was sent out back in November, the war between Israel and Hamas was pretty much contained to Gaza. And since late November of 2023, we've seen there's definitely been an escalation, most notably by the Houthis in Yemen attacking ships in international waters, the U.S. countering that with multiple rounds of strikes against the Houthis. The Houthis have long-range missiles that cannot only attack shipping but could even potentially reach Israel, I believe. And I think there was a case early in the conflict in which one such missile was intercepted by Israel. So there's that dimension. There is the possibility of Hezbollah, which is an Islamist militant group backed by Iran, conducting attacks across the border from Lebanon into Israel and Israel striking back. And we've seen since November, that has started to occur and there's been an uptick in violence there. We've also seen Israeli forces attacking targets in Syria, which are believed to be against Iran-backed militant groups there. There's been no direct attack on Iran so much, but we've seen Iran striking what they think are Israeli targets in northern Iraq. We've seen an uptick in Iranian-backed militants attacking U.S. forces in Syria and Iraq and the U.S. retaliating. And perhaps most surprising of all, we saw Iran striking targets in Pakistan and Pakistan striking back against targets in Iran. And so any one of these four or five, if you will, vectors or trajectories of potential escalation could definitely get worse in the coming months. And it's not hard to see how what was previously a relatively contained conflict becomes a much wider regional conflagration.

SIERRA: The PPS report lists threats in relation to the United States. The Middle East is about 7,000 miles away, right. But sometimes what happens there hits close to home. In January, an Iran-backed group killed three Americans at a military base in Jordan. So, in what other ways might this directly affect the United States?

STARES: In several ways. One is it's distracted the U.S. in its support for Ukraine against Russia. There's not only the attention that policymakers can give to countries that are under attack, but the level of support: military, diplomatic is also affected. And I think the U.S. has become increasingly distracted by trying to tamp down the possibility of escalation. They've deployed carrier battle groups to the Eastern Mediterranean. As I say, they've already ramped up some strikes against threats to their forces in Syria and Iraq. So it's a big distraction there. There's always the possibility that the war will resonate domestically. We've seen some extent in terms of level of protests in the U.S. against Israeli actions in Gaza, and that's a source of concern and can become a kind of issue in the presidential campaign. It's a source of tension with allies too. Several U.S. allies have been quite critical of Israeli actions in Gaza. And so that becomes a tension there. Again an unwelcome development at this time. 

SIERRA: What steps could help avoid the worst outcomes for an escalating Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

STARES: Well, definitely you have to think about this in all its dimensions. There's obviously the efforts to try to deter further escalation militarily by either the Houthis, and we're seeing that trying to degrade the Houthis capacity to attack shipping. We've seen U.S. military force being used as a warning to Iran to again try to control their proxy forces in Lebanon and Iraq. So there's the military dimension. There's the diplomatic angle too, and you've seen U.S. officials going to the region on a regular basis trying to broker a ceasefire in Gaza, engaging with Gulf countries and Egypt to try to sort of bring the fighting to an end, to see the hostages released from Hamas. And you've seen efforts also to try to stabilize international markets so they're not roiled in a really destabilizing way by the conflict there. So there are multiple ways we can try to contain this, to deescalate, look for off ramps, try to encourage some of the key countries involved here to show restraint and look for a diplomatic solution rather than escalate in a really harmful way.

Moving on to big threat number three and bringing it back home: a migration crisis on the southwest U.S. border.

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TODAY: The crisis at the border? Unrelenting with thousands arriving daily from California to Arizona and Texas.

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NBC News: Tonight, customs and border protection overwhelmed by an unprecedented number of migrants crossing the southern border.

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FOX 26 Houston: Many lawmakers are now calling it a war against fentanyl, and they believe it starts right here at the border impacting families hundreds of miles away.

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ABC News: President Biden and Donald Trump both there late today, just demonstrating how significant this issue is with the presidential election this November.

STARES: Throughout 2023, we saw a substantial increase in the number of migrants reaching the southern border of the U.S. Reports that as many as 2.3-2.4 million migrants arrived in the U.S. in an unregulated fashion in 2023. The end of the year, something like 10,000 were crossing the border every day. It's an extraordinary number. They were coming from a lot of different places: obviously Central America and  Mexico. A lot of it's driven by economic hardship there, political corruption, criminal violence, but also from beyond Central America and Mexico. A lot of them were coming through the Darién Gap, this part of the Central American Isthmus, from Venezuela, where the situation remains pretty dire there. Ecuador, where there's been a lot of instability in recent months because of criminal violence. Haiti is another source of a lot of migrants. And so these have been surging through Mexico onto the southwest border. What I understand is that since early January 2024, things have declined a little bit, but probably still around 2-3000 a day, which is still an awful lot of people. It's become a major political football if you will. Republicans are holding up support for Ukraine and Israel until the administration adopts certain measures to strengthen, harden the border. And that problem has not yet been resolved. So there's a lot of angles here that I think people are worried about.

Much like the first threat on our list, this one takes place here at home, but it isn’t as cut and dry to understand. The migration crisis encompasses a complex number of threats, which, taken together, are potentially highly destabilizing. 

According to foreign policy experts, these threats include the vast suffering of the migrants themselves, deepening instability in source countries, the potential for deadly drugs to slip through the border, and a rapidly escalating border crisis that could involve the U.S. military - all of which cultivate a deepening of the intense political divisiveness we have seen emerge in the U.S. surrounding immigration. 

SIERRA: How could this pose a security threat to the United States? What separates it from like a traditional immigration issue?

STARES: I like to say that migration, per se, should not be considered a national security threat. I think unregulated borders, open borders, can be definitely considered a security concern if you don't know who's coming across. The influx of fentanyl, that's been a big concern. It's causing a lot of deaths in the U.S. So there's definitely that angle. I think it's broadly this concern that it's hard to just assimilate a lot of people all at once. And that creates sort of societal stresses, resentment amongst locals, it burdens social security networks and so on, and health facilities. And overall, that is probably, I think the biggest concern here rather than a kind of traditional national security threat. 

SIERRA: It seems like this problem is causing a lot of debate both in D.C. and in our own neighborhoods at home, right. It seems like a really hard problem to fix, so can we do anything about it? 

STARES: You know there's the immediate effort to try to reduce the places along the border where immigrants are coming in a completely unregulated, sometimes in an unsafe way. Sometimes migrants die getting across the border and you obviously want to reduce that happening. So efforts to try to, if you will, harden the border, increase the level of law enforcement so that you're not overwhelmed in any one place. I think the effort that the Biden administration has been trying to focus on in recent months is more sort of upstream efforts to try to encourage the transit countries to dissuade migrants to improve their border security so that they are not becoming a magnet for migrants and trying to sort of say, reduce the flow through Central America. So I think there's lots of ways to do it, but ultimately it's trying to improve the conditions in the principal source countries like Venezuela and Central America, the so-called northern triangle countries, which have been racked by criminal violence and so on. If people feel that they have a future there, they're obviously less likely to come into the U.S. and that I think is the only real solution here.

SIERRA: What feels like is missing is anything related to climate. We’re coming off the warmest year on record, and coverage of fires and floods and drought seemed constant. So is climate just not on the list at all?

STARES: So climate is indirectly included. I think many of the contingencies include at least implicitly the possibility that either severe weather events or droughts or water shortages or fights over access to water could become a real source of conflict. And so there's several places where that is definitely, I think, an issue - in the Horn of Africa, in the Sahel, maybe even parts of Asia too. So while it's not specifically mentioned in most contingencies, that is definitely part of the mix. There's no question about that. And we're seeing more and more I think concern over the impact of climate change as a driver or an accelerant, if you will, of conflict. It's just very hard to assess the likelihood of specific climate related events and how they would trigger violent conflict. That's always been really difficult to predict in a precise way.

SIERRA: Overall, is there anything on there that you would like to draw more attention to or were even surprised by?

STARES: I think there's a sort of macro observation this year that really caught my attention. We've never seen this level of anxiety or foreboding about a year in advance. Three of the thirty contingencies were judged to be high likelihood and high impact, and we've never had that. Even last year, I think there wasn't what we call a high-high, a high likelihood high impact, but this year we had three - unprecedented, never happened before. And of the thirty contingencies, only two were considered low probability. Again, pretty scary stuff when you think about it that so many people are really worried about the direction of the world and particularly conflict trends in the world. Something I think I mentioned last year this time was that the countries that were uppermost in the minds of many U.S. foreign policy experts sort of related to, if you will, the kind of post 9/11 agenda. These were countries where the U.S. city either sent troops to fight in or were worried about instability there and drawing in troops down the road. And for many years after 9/11, these parts of the world dominated our concerns about the world. And Afghanistan was up there, Iraq obviously, Pakistan, political instability in Pakistan, the possibility of war between India and Pakistan. These dominated how the U.S. foreign policy community, what their principal concerns were. This year, when you look at what's in the lowest tier, many of those same countries are now considered tier three risks where the impact is now considered low. They're still worried about this happening, but thinking that if it were to happen, the impact on the U.S. wouldn't be so great. So Afghanistan is there, Somalia where there are still U.S. forces, Libya, and as I say, India and Pakistan, and political instability in Pakistan, low impact. When you think about it, Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state and anytime you begin to worry about political instability in a nuclear-armed state, frankly you should be, I think, a little more concerned than people seem to believe in or they either didn't understand the implications here. So that was, I thought, the biggest surprise. I'm always worried moreover that because of the concern given to these tier-one conflicts or potential conflicts, some really terrible humanitarian threats don't get the attention. They tend to sort of now fall down the pecking order in terms of things we worry about. But the situation in Sudan, for instance, it’s been terrible this last year. I think the latest UN reports probably puts 10-15,000 died in Darfur or in Southern Sudan alone. That's a terrible situation. In Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, again, there's been a lot of fighting, a lot of refugees displaced, and these sort of slip down our consciousness about what is going on. And South Sudan, the Sahel, this area of Sub-Saharan Africa in the western part of Africa, is again very unstable. It's had a lot of coups in the last 12, 24 months. These places, most foreign policy experts in the U.S. kind of go, "huh, well if it happens, it happens. Not much we can do about it." And so I do worry about that.

Last year saw conflicts worsen around the world. Chances are this list has probably not left you feeling upbeat. But not all is lost. In fact, some countries improved their relationships this year - potentially making the world safer.

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DW News: U.S. President Joe Biden says he's made real progress in talks with China's leader Xi Jinping… They announced new cooperation in areas including narcotics, AI, and avoiding military misunderstandings.

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CGTN Global Watch: Armenia and Azerbaijan have been able to agree on the basic principles for a peace treaty. The treaty includes mutual recognition of territorial integrity and sovereignty.

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Reuters: Historical foes Greece and Turkey hope to usher in a new era of closer ties… They agree to pursue good neighborly relations and work on obstacles that have kept them apart. 

STARES: There hasn't been all doom and gloom last year, and maybe it's easy to get fixated with everything that's deteriorated and increased concerns around the world, and I think that's generally justified. But I think there were some silver linings, if you will, relations between the U.S. and China improved somewhat at the end of 2023. There's an agreement to reestablish military-to-military channels to possibly deal with crises if they happen. So that's welcome. U.S. and China is going to try to do something about this fentanyl drug crisis as well. So that's good. You saw China, by the way, playing a positive role in brokering peace between, or rapprochement probably, between Saudi Arabia and Iran last year, a sign of potential Chinese involvement in sort of global security issues. So that I think is encouraging. You have Armenia and Azerbaijan, they've reached some kind of peace agreement. Now, admittedly, that came after this horrible attack by Azerbaijan on this enclave in Azerbaijan known as Nagorno-Karabakh, and some 50,000 refugees were sort of expelled toward Armenia. Terrible thing, but the situation doesn't look to be as bad as it once looked like it would become. Finally, Greece and Turkey began to talk, and the relations between those two countries are seemingly improving. Last year it was in the survey as a potential flashpoint in the Eastern Mediterranean. Yet in recent months, we've seen the leaders of those two countries begin to talk and possibly move in a more peaceful direction. So, some glimmers of hope there, and we can hope that something happens this coming year, which will also, as I say, improve matters in different parts of the world.

SIERRA: Always worth taking a moment to honor the positives. Perhaps, you could do a sister survey that is the positive prediction survey and next year we can go through that.

STARES: Wouldn't that be great?

SIERRA: It would be lovely. Well, thank you so much, Paul. You know, obviously our policymakers have their work cut out for them, and we as well have to do our part at the ballot box, but I appreciate you walking us through the next year.

STARES: It's been great. Thank you so much for having me on the show again and look forward to seeing you next time. 

For resources used in this episode and more information, visit CFR.org/whyitmatters and take a look at the show notes. If you ever have any questions or suggestions or just want to chat with us, email at [email protected] or you can hit us up on Twitter at @CFR_org.

Why It Matters is a production of the Council on Foreign Relations. The opinions expressed on the show are solely that of the guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

This episode was produced by Asher Ross, Molly McAnany, Noah Berman and me, Gabrielle Sierra. Our sound designer is Markus Zakaria. Our interns this semester are Olivia Green and Meher Bhatia. Robert McMahon is our Managing Editor, and Doug Halsey is our Chief Digital Officer. Extra help for this episode was provided by Mariel Ferragamo. Our theme music is composed by Ceiri Torjussen.

You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your audio. For Why It Matters, this is Gabrielle Sierra signing off. See you soon!