Ukraine, Israel and Donald Trump; as we enter a new year, Dr John Hulsman tells us what major things to expect from global politics in 2024.
As the English theologian Thomas Fuller put it, “It’s always darkest before the dawn”. After a highly unsatisfying 2023, we can only fervently hope that Fuller’s plaintive prayer is right. As to political risk in 2024, despite all the storm clouds, I do think he is. But first the bad news that will enable the good.
1. The Zelensky government will be unable to turn the tide of the war in Ukraine.
My political risk firm was one of only a handful able to dispense with the general wish-casting of last January in this column, correctly calling that the Russo-Ukrainian war would descend into stalemate.
As we predicted, the over-hyped Ukrainian offensive dissolved in the face of Russian mines and Moscow’s ability to sacrifice thousands of men to Bakhmut and other World War I-style battlefields.
Given its huge advantage in manpower and greater ability to manufacture and acquire weaponry, stalemate means that Russia is actually winning the war. In 2024 things will only get worse, as the US tires of supporting a cause that amounts to only a peripheral interest.
At best, Kiev will just about manage to hold onto the 80 per cent of the country it now retains; at worst it will lose more land. Gone is any serious hope of throwing Putin out of the country. The sooner the Zelensky government heads to the negotiating table from its waning position of strength the better. Any other course of action is simply magical thinking.
2. Israel will ‘win’ the Gaza war, but it has already lost the strategic peace.
While there is little doubt that Israel will come to dominate the whole of the Gaza strip, in political risk terms it is a case of too little, too late. Before the Gaza War, the Saudis were close to joining President Trump’s creative Abraham Accords initiative, which saw the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan establish diplomatic relations with Israel in a common strategic alliance directed against Iranian adventurism. Riyadh joining would have left Tehran facing its primary enemies (the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel) increasingly bonded together against it.
This is the key political risk context explaining the advent of the Gaza War. While Israel will undoubtedly ‘win’ the war, the bleak truth is that it has already lost the peace. For given the pro-Palestinian fervor unleashed onto the Saudi street in the aftermath of Israel’s incursion into Gaza, there is simply no way Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) can go ahead with the Abraham Accord deal. Iran has already succeeded in its strategic objective.
3. A realist revolution in American foreign policy is coming with Donald Trump reclaiming the White House.
The best news of all is that all this bad news is at last leading to corrective consequences in the US. After a generation of abject failure, the fevered, hyperactive, unipolar foreign policy of both the neoconservatives and the Wilsonian triumphalists is on its way out politically with the coming of a realist Republican administration.
Why will Trump win? Because the discredited US elite, symbolised by the tired Joe Biden, is held in so low esteem. The US elite is increasingly disdained because of a generation’s litany of catastrophe. Jeffersonian and Jacksonian realist populists in the GOP are entirely in lockstep over the basic narrative. The elite’s record is undeniably appalling: Iraq, Afghanistan, the financial crisis and a botched response to Covid. While somehow the oblivious coastal elites still think it is self-evident that they should run things, the rest of us know better. Look for the measured American realism – based on specific, clearly defined US interests – of FDR, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan to begin to make a comeback in 2024. That would surely be the dawn.
Our bonus call is also positive: There will be no war this year over Taiwan between peer superpower competitors China and the US. This gives America time to bolster its deterrence in the region with allies through the AUKUS Defence Alliance (US, Australia, the UK) and the Quadrilateral Initiative (US, India, Australia and Japan). If Washington can cause Beijing to hesitate in pulling the trigger, its strategic window to invade Taiwan will close. Given that the Indo-Pacific is the most important region in the world, with much of the planet’s future economic growth as well as most of its future political risk, this effort is everything. Here’s to saving our world.
Dr John C. Hulsman is managing partner of John C. Hulsman Enterprises, a global political risk consulting firm. His new book is ‘The Last Best Hope: A History of American Realism’