A world of rising risks and little leadership
"The era of American dominance is "definitively over," war with China is growing more likely, and world leaders are risking long-term security by refusing to face challenges like climate change, according to a new Atlantic Council report titled "Global Risks 2035."
[ Illustration: Rebecca Zisser/Axios ]
The big picture: Author Mathew Burrows, a CIA veteran who previously steered long-term risk forecasts for the U.S. intelligence community, writes that the world is slipping into a "new bipolarity" defined by competition between the U.S. and China. . .
The U.S. has so far been unwilling to adapt to the changing global reality, Burrows tells Axios. No other country would imagine it could "only ensure national security through primacy," he says. . .
The big picture: Most of the worst-case scenarios Burrows envisions are based not on an unexpected event, but on failure to act on entirely foreseeable challenges like struggling middle classes in the West, growing mountains of debt and climate change.
- "These things are fixable," he says, but they require leadership and a sense of purpose that eclipses the partisan divide. Burrows doesn't sound particularly optimistic.
The bottom line: "Is there any way to stop the descent?" Burrows writes in the report. "No leader believes he or she has the means to stop it. At home in all the major powers, growing populism, nativism, and jingoism come to the fore, militating against saving the world."
