Peering Into the Crystal Ball: 10 National Security Predictions for 2024

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep! Robbie and Jack here. Hope everyone got a nice holiday break and spent time with their family, friends, and loved ones relaxing and, more importantly, nagging them all to subscribe to Foreign Policy. (Hey, the best things in life aren’t free.)

Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: A look ahead at some of the biggest national security headaches of 2024 and our predictions on what the new year could bring in the world of foreign policy. (Spoiler alert: There’s some doom and gloom to come.)

So, What Comes Next?

By all accounts, 2023 was an absolutely insane year. There was the spy balloon incident; Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s untimely demise; the Israel-Hamas war, which shook the foundations of an already shaky Middle East; Russia’s war in Ukraine, which continued to rage; a fast-unraveling conflict in Sudan; Azerbaijan’s lightning offensive against Armenia over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh territory. We could go on, but let’s not.

Looking ahead to 2024 and there are plenty of things in the world to keep national security wonks up at night. Then there are elections in Taiwan, India, the European Union, Mexico, South Africa, Indonesia, and, oh, we almost forgot, the United States as well.

Here at SitRep, we’ve decided to make some predictions about what’s to come in 2024, big and small, based on interviews over the past few weeks and months with dozens of government officials, lawmakers, and foreign-policy experts. (We’d also like to stress that, in many instances, we hope our predictions are wrong.)

Some may come true, some may not, and either way our readers can call us out on how off the mark we were in about a year. (So mark your calendars.)

But nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? So, without further ado, here is the “SitRep: Crystal Ball” edition of what we think awaits us in the scary near-future.

1. U.S. elections results. Let’s start with the easy one: What will happen in the U.S. presidential election? Political pundits are famously very bad at predicting election results, and then getting paid to do more of it in the next cycle, so we decided we’re going to join in on the fun. We predict that after a grueling and exhausting Biden-Trump rematch, U.S. President Joe Biden will narrowly eke out a win for a second term, in yet another election cycle marred by disinformation that will muddy the waters on what’s fact and what’s not, with more shouts about “stolen votes.” Meanwhile, we predict that Republicans will regain control of the Senate by two or three seats, and Democrats will gain narrow control of the House by under 10 seats, setting the stage for another complex, messy, political headache of a divided government.

2. North Korea will conduct its seventh nuclear test. U.S. efforts to restart any real dialogue with North Korea have failed, and all the while North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is slowly but surely expanding his country’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities despite punishing international sanctions. North Korea conducted six explosive nuclear tests between 2006 and 2017, and we predict that 2024 is the year that it notches a seventh, in what will constitute another major diplomatic crisis on the Korean Peninsula and a reminder that decades of U.S. pressure to get Pyongyang to abandon its quest for the bomb have all failed.

3. More coups in Africa’s “Coup Belt.” There have been six coups in West Africa in recent years as ailing and fragile democracies succumb to military takeovers amid a war against Islamist terrorist groups, which are gaining ground across the Sahel. The United States and Western allies, namely France, banked most of their hopes on Niger as their last best hope for a bastion of democracy and stability to partner with on counterterrorism operations … until Niger fell to a coup in July. We predict that the next domino to fall will be Chad, the West’s next “last best hope” counterterrorism partner in the region. Chad’s leader, Mahamat Idriss Déby, son of the late Chadian leader Idriss Déby, seized power after his father’s death in 2021 in something that resembled a coup itself. Now, his grip on power is shaky, and it’s unclear if he can beat the odds of escaping yet another coup in Africa’s Coup Belt.

4. Sudan’s military leader will get ousted. And speaking of coups… The conflict in Sudan has taken a grim turn in recent weeks, even if attention on the dire crisis there is being eclipsed by the Israel-Hamas war. We predict that Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the leader of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and de facto head of the country, will be ousted by elements of his own military after embarrassing setbacks and defeats against the rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Most recently, the Sudanese city of Wad Madani, once a relatively stable bastion of peace and humanitarian operations, fell swiftly to the RSF in a major blow to the SAF. Regardless of Burhan’s prospects for staying in power, Sudan has become one of the world’s worst (and most tragically overlooked) humanitarian crises, and that isn’t likely to change in 2024.

5. A stalemate in Ukraine. Thanks in part to sluggish support and political impasse from the United States and other Western allies, Ukraine didn’t have enough guns, equipment, or ammo to punch a hole in Russia’s well-fortified defensive lines in eastern Ukraine during its 2023 counteroffensive. But neither do Russian forces have the capability, morale, training, or effective fighting prowess to make significant gains in any counter-counteroffensives of their own. We predict that 2024 will look a lot like the bloody but static World War I battles of 1915 and 1916, with heavy artillery bashing entrenched positions, more deadly battles that yield little territorial gains, and little to show for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ill-fated war besides a higher death toll on both sides.

Construction workers climb onto the roof of a destroyed church in the village of Bohorodychne in the Donetsk region on Jan. 4, after Ukraine recaptured control of the town amid the Russia-Ukraine war. Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images

6. More funds unlocked for Ukraine. Ever since Russia launched its latest invasion of Ukraine, Western officials have been grappling with what to do about the $300 billion in assets from Russian oligarchs that regulators have frozen. Some countries have long called for seizing those funds and sending them to Ukraine, while others worry about the precedent that sets in protecting sovereign assets in the eyes of international law, even when it comes to Russia. We predict that 2024 is the year there’s a breakthrough on this roughly two-year debate and the United States and European allies find a legal pathway to siphon all those frozen funds to Ukraine (especially after U.S. funds for Ukraine got ensnared in a thorny political battle in Congress and more European Union funds were blocked by Putin’s most reliable ally in the EU, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.)

7. The Israel-Hamas war won’t expand to a (full) second front. One of the biggest fears in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war is that Hamas’s better-equipped, more battle-hardened ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah, will fully dive into the war against Israel. We predict that even as Israel and Hezbollah trade limited pot shots on the northern border, this won’t happen, thanks in part to the deterrent effect of the ongoing U.S. aircraft carrier presence in the Mediterranean, and all the overwhelming firepower that comes with it, which will make Hezbollah and its backers in Iran hold off from diving headfirst into the fight.

8. More dangerous maneuvers in the South China Sea. With the Taiwan Strait at a lower simmer since then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 visit to Taiwan, which prompted (or perhaps coincided with) a bevy of Chinese exercises, the main military tit-for-tat in the Indo-Pacific has moved to the South China Sea. There, China has spent a decade building up artificial islands, very real airfields, and a fright for all in the region.

Lately, Chinese vessels have repeatedly harassed Philippine resupply missions to the Second Thomas Shoal, a disputed area off the west coast of the archipelago. The Philippines, which has taken an increasingly hawkish tack on China since Ferdinand Marcos Jr. took over as president in 2022, grounded a U.S. World War II-era ship on the shoal in 1999 in an effort to claim it. And China has harassed resupply vessels with dangerous maneuvers and water cannons in an effort to scare Manila away. SitRep expects the trend to continue in 2024, as the U.S. Defense Department has also complained of increasing recklessness by Chinese ships and planes, not just at the Second Thomas Shoal but throughout the whole area of operations.

9. Sweden actually finally joins NATO. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Finland and Sweden rushed to shrug off their history of nonalignment and join NATO. NATO countries welcomed both with open arms—or at least most of them did. Finland got in, but Sweden has not yet, thanks to an 18-month filibuster by Turkey. (All NATO countries need to greenlight a new member before it can happen.) Hungary, run by Russia’s ally, has dragged its heels on Sweden’s NATO accession, too. This has become a massive diplomatic headache for the alliance. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan linked Sweden’s accession to a U.S. deal to approve sales of F-16 fighter jets to Turkey. Congress has blocked that deal over anger at Erdogan but also wants Sweden in NATO ASAP. We predict that U.S. and Turkish negotiators will work with Sweden to overcome that impasse in 2024 and NATO will finally expand from 31 to 32 members.

10. Global health community goes on the offensive against malaria. Let’s end on a happy note. Malaria remains a top cause of child mortality worldwide, but recent scientific breakthroughs have led for the first time ever to malaria vaccines. There are now two malaria vaccines being slowly rolled out across disease-vulnerable countries in Africa. (An estimated 619,000 people died of malaria in Africa in 2021, many of them children.) While supply shortages made rolling out these vaccines on a massive scale difficult in 2022 and 2023, we predict that the global health community can overcome those bottlenecks in 2024 and make real, tangible, verifiable progress toward achieving the World Health Organization’s goal of eliminating malaria by 2030.

Snapshot

An Israel Defense Forces artillery unit, using a self-propelled artillery howitzer, fires toward Gaza near the border in southern Israel on Dec. 11. Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

Put on Your Radar

Here’s a rundown of some big events coming up in 2024 to plan for.

Jan. 13: Taiwan holds its presidential election in a cycle that will have outsized importance for the self-governing island’s future relationship with China.

Jan. 15-19: Global elites gather for the world’s premiere gabfest at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Feb. 14: Indonesia holds its presidential election in what will be the world’s largest single-day elections.

Feb. 16-18: World leaders and national security experts gather in Munich for the annual Munich Security Conference.

April-May: India, the world’s largest democracy, holds general elections over the course of several weeks.

July 9-11: NATO leaders will convene in Washington for a major NATO summit.

Sept. 24: World leaders will begin convening in New York for the U.N. General Assembly high-level week, as part of the General Assembly’s 79th session.

Nov. 5: Election Day in the United States. Need we say more?