Gabriel Elefteriu offers his predictions for 2024 at Brussels Signal>:
- Ukraine: the key to surviving the 2024 campaign is political stability in Kyiv. Overall, the situation at the front will get worse before it gets better.
- The Middle East powder keg: no complete detonation, but chaos will spread including on our streets.
- Taiwan: China will continue its preparations for war but will not strike.
concluding that the outlook while bleaik is not preordained:
Western power is at a low ebb in historical terms as regards the military balance. Our adversaries have the initiative – and even the upper hand – in a number of domains, regions or subsets of global affairs. The three global flashpoints in Ukraine, the Middle East and Taiwan act as fractures in the US-backed system of global security, fractures that Russia, Iran and China are trying to widen and deepen.
The fact that the West is proving increasingly more incompetent at strategy and global action hardly bears repeating. It is enough to consider the fact that approaching the third year of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia is on the offensive and its economy is growing – whether this is temporary or not, time will tell – while those of leading Western nations are teetering on the brink of recession, with some, like Germany, de-industrialising.
That actually sounds optimistic to me.
Meh. Interesting that we always question statistics coming out of China but must take Russia’s reported numbers at face value. If Russia is really increasing GDP it is because it is spending so much on the special military operation. Russia has always been fairly resource rich but has never been able to turn that into wealth due to poor governance and corruption. That hasn’t changed.
As to the rest, the big difference is CHina. We always knew that Russia would try to re-establish its empire, hence NATO, and we also knew it would be hard to fight them in their backyard. Any nation adjacent to Russia not in NATO is at risk. Sweden and Finland figured that out, but that’s really old news. CHina has had nukes for a long time but its standing military and navy wasn’t much of a threat as it was poorly trained and armed. We are also finding out that there nature of conflict has changed and things like drones and cyber attacks level the field more than we like between major powers and small groups. Asymmetrical warfare got harder.
Steve