The Economist’s ‘World Ahead’ Guide Declares Donald Trump The Biggest Global Threat In 2024
The biggest danger the world faces in 2024 is if former President Donald Trump is elected to a second term, according to The Economist’s guide to The World Ahead.
In the 38 years since the predictive guide was first published, “no single person has ever eclipsed our analysis as much as Donald Trump eclipses 2024,” the article begins. It goes on to ponder what a Trump victory would mean for the world and claims that parliaments and boardrooms the world over are filled with “despair” at what may come:
A second Trump term would be a watershed in a way the first was not. Victory would confirm his most destructive instincts about power. His plans would encounter less resistance. And because America will have voted him in while knowing the worst, its moral authority would decline. The election will be decided by tens of thousands of voters in just a handful of states. In 2024 the fate of the world will depend on their ballots.
Trump would move his MAGA Republican allies into “the most important positions” in government, the article predicts, and Trump would be “unbound in his pursuit of retribution, economic protectionism and theatrically extravagant deals.”
The article posits that a Trump win would signal to China that American democracy is “dysfunctional,” and could give the communist nation the incentive to invade its island neighbor, Taiwan. In addition, the article predicts that Trump’s desire to quickly end the war in Ukraine would give Vladimir Putin the impetus to take over other neighboring countries like Moldova and the Baltic states.
The guide’s look ahead to 2023, was more optimistic about the presidential elections.
“Whoever ends up dispatching Donald Trump, at long last, will determine that future,” wrote columnist James Bennet. “Will it be a primary opponent? Or, in the general election of 2024, will it be President Joe Biden, or a Democrat representing a new direction for the party?”
But this year’s article resigns itself to the possibility that no one will end up “dispatching” Trump.
“That a Trump victory next November is a coin-toss probability is beginning to sink in,” the article concedes.
Read the Economist’s guide to The World Ahead 2024 here.
