2024 Is Shaping Up to Be a Turning Point in Global Politics
The warnings from European leaders about what the coming months could bring are sounding increasingly alarming—and alarmed.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, for example, recently described this moment for Europe as a “pre-war era.” Speaking of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine, he declared, “literally any scenario is possible. We haven’t seen a situation like this since 1945.”
World War II was also the analogy used by Adm. Rob Bauer, the head of NATO’s military committee, when he noted wryly in an interview with a Dutch daily, “Nothing can happen to us, right? We thought that too in May of 1940.” That’s the month when Hitler’s forces invaded the Netherlands and much of Western Europe.
Bauer says there’s no concrete evidence that Russia is planning an attack—Russian President Vladimir Putin has called those claims nonsense—but both he and Tusk, along with many other European leaders, urgently maintain that Europe needs to prepare, and do it fast. Multiple officials, particularly in the Baltics and in the former Soviet satellite states, are convinced that Putin would not stop with Ukraine if he succeeds there. Putin’s own words support those arguments.
With every passing day, 2024 looks more like a hinge year in history.
Every year is crucial, and unexpected events (remember the pandemic?) can reroute the course of history at any moment.
And yet, there are good reasons to believe that this is, in fact, a more important than average year in the trajectory of global events. That’s because a number of crucial developments and trends are unfolding almost simultaneously and interacting with each other to supercharge their impact.
The year started with two major wars in key regions of the world—in Europe and the Middle East—in addition to multiple other conflicts they have overshadowed. Those two wars, occurring on the edge of vital areas for global economic activity, are pulsing with potential to expand and cause worldwide reverberations.
The hot conflicts overlap with the planet’s most important election, the 2024 presidential contest in the United States, whose outcome could produce a dramatic shift in the foreign policy of the world’s most powerful country.
All of this is occurring amid an explosion of influence operations by multiple actors determined to manipulate public opinion and, through it, affect policy in Western democracies and elsewhere.
If President Joe Biden wins reelection in November, the U.S. will seek to maintain its current network of alliances, while largely continuing its current policies. But the threat that he may lose has already added to the urgency of Europe’s calls to prepare to face its challenges without the benefit of the U.S. security umbrella. As proof of the risk, former President Donald Trump’s allies in the U.S. Congress have brought American support for Ukraine to a virtual halt.
If Trump wins, U.S. foreign policy will diverge dramatically from its current course at a crucial time. Trump has already made it clear that he has no intention of continuing U.S. support for Ukraine and that, he would “encourage” the Russians to do “whatever the hell they want” against NATO allies of the United States who don’t meet their military spending commitment.
Even if NATO allies all boost their defense budgets above the agreed 2 percent, Trump has shown little interest in sending U.S. forces to Europe’s rescue—or anybody else’s for that matter. That’s a reality that will impact the calculations of all actors.
The end of any U.S. aspiration to a Pax Americana would create a global power vacuum when the West’s two principal adversaries, Russia and China are flexing their muscles in their neighborhoods and beyond.
Former officials of his administration say he intended to leave NATO. That may not be so easy to do. But it would be fairly simple for him, as commander-in-chief, to pull back sharply from U.S. involvement with the alliance.
But the implications of this moment are even larger than NATO, and bigger than Trump.
A recent poll found that for the first time in half a century, a majority of Republicans want the United States to stay out of world affairs. The GOP has adopted Trump’s isolationist worldview. If Trump becomes president, that trend is likely to continue, and could lead to reversing the course of U.S. foreign policy toward an inward looking, mercantilist one, precisely at a time when autocracy is gaining ground against democracy across the planet.
Russia and China are actively engaged in social media efforts to create mistrust in democracy and institutions across the West. Czech authorities recently discovered that a Russian network was operating a popular news website—the Voice of Europe—that had sought to influence elections across the continent with pro-Russian information. China, according to independent studies and U.S. officials, is already engaged in election interference in the U.S.
The end of any U.S. aspiration to a Pax Americana would create a global power vacuum when the West’s two principal adversaries, Russia and China—and arguably Iran—are flexing their muscles in their neighborhoods and beyond. It would increase the likelihood of additional hostilities not just in the Middle East and Europe but also in Asia and Africa.
And there is every reason to expect that nuclear non-proliferation efforts would fade away. Not only has Trump suggested that South Korea and Japan—who have relied on U.S. protection against their nuclear-armed neighbors—should consider obtaining nuclear weapons, but the absence of U.S. security guarantees would spur those countries to pursue that end.
In the Middle East, Trump’s policy toward Israel likely would be only marginally different from Biden’s, but it’s hard to predict what he would do regarding Iran.
A new de facto alignment of autocracies—Russia, China, Iran and North Korea—means that international efforts to restrain regimes like North Korea and Iran, efforts that China and Russia had supported, may now become unworkable, regardless of who wins the U.S. election. That means that Pyongyang and Tehran’s neighbors—again, South Korea and Japan, but also Saudi Arabia and maybe others in the region—will also seek to boost their defensive capabilities. More of the world will be on a hair trigger.
All that said, there is a possibility that from all these conflicts could emerge some new measure of stability: if Ukraine succeeds against Russia and Putin’s ambitions are chastened; if the U.S.-Europe alliance remains strong because of a Biden victory; if the war between Israel and Hamas ends up producing a constructive new path; if China, watching the failure of Russia and the strength of the Western alliance, becomes more restrained against threatening its neighbors.
Indeed, all the elements are in place to make this year a turning point in history.
Frida Ghitis is a world affairs columnist and a regular contributor to CNN and The Washington Post. Her WPR column appears every Thursday. You can follow her on Twitter at @fridaghitis.