FP’s look ahead

Every year since 2017, we have given our predictions for the greatest threats facing the world. If some of the top risks this year seem to echo those we anticipated for 2025, it is not that they are static, but that the peril continues, without reaching a denouement. The risks of a Trump presidency we feared have come faster and thicker than we envisioned of Gaza, Ukraine, and climate. China and Taiwan are not among the top geopolitical risks, as we judge 2026 is unlikely to see tensions rise to that level in the aftermath of the summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The world remains in a protracted interregnum, still unsettled, fragmenting, but no less contested. The National Security Strategy makes the U.S. retreat from primacy official: “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” The old neoliberal rules-based architecture is decomposing, power diffusing, and much of the world is searching for new multilateral arrangements to act as a buffer against three predatory, revisionist major powers.

Every year since 2017, we have given our predictions for the greatest threats facing the world. If some of the top risks this year seem to echo those we anticipated for 2025, it is not that they are static, but that the peril continues, without reaching a denouement. The risks of a Trump presidency we feared have come faster and thicker than we envisioned of Gaza, Ukraine, and climate. China and Taiwan are not among the top geopolitical risks, as we judge 2026 is unlikely to see tensions rise to that level in the aftermath of the summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The world remains in a protracted interregnum, still unsettled, fragmenting, but no less contested. The National Security Strategy makes the U.S. retreat from primacy official: “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” The old neoliberal rules-based architecture is decomposing, power diffusing, and much of the world is searching for new multilateral arrangements to act as a buffer against three predatory, revisionist major powers.

Their efforts raise the question of whether it is possible to have a stable multilateral system without a hegemon. The world is approaching an inflection point, where discontinuity—war, financial crisis, or natural disaster—buries the post-Cold War era and ushers in a new, unknowable order.

With three years yet in his term, Trump is already the most consequential and transformative president since FDR, what some would call a world-historical figure—one who alters the course of history, and likely not for the better. The United States appears to many a predatory rogue actor, a major destabilizing force with Trump diminishing the value of alliances and multilateralism that have been the hallmarks of U.S. foreign policy since 1945.

The militarization of U.S. cities; dissolution of U.S. soft power (e.g., the U.S. Agency for International Development, Voice of America); the slashing of research and development budgets, the secret sauce of U.S. innovation; and abandonment of U.S.-led multilateral institutions (of late, the COP30 climate summit and G-20) and reordering of global trade have fostered worries of a rogue America out to destroy itself and the system it created. Trends are not pointing toward others picking up the pieces, able to renew a rules-based liberal, multilateralist order.

This ninth edition of our annual foresight exercise, “Top 10 Global Risks,” is drawn from our forecasting experience at the National Intelligence Council. In the language of intelligence, we have medium to high confidence in all the probabilities we have assigned to each of the risks, given the “credible” to “high-quality” level of information that is available. As it is for intelligence estimates a “high or medium confidence” judgment still carries the possibility of it being wrong.

A banner displayed by the organization MoveOn in Los Angeles on Dec. 12, 2025, protests U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs on imports.Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images

Many economists have already sounded the alarm that all the preconditions are present for economic meltdown. Financial assets are massively overvalued with unbounded artificial intelligence fueling 40 percent of U.S. GDP growth and 80 percent of stock market growth even though productivity gains by companies experimenting with AI are so far elusive.

Some experts are beginning to doubt whether AI can really go beyond machine learning to the artificial general intelligence of Silicon Valley dreams, charging that current AI models can handle simple problems but “fundamentally break down on complex tasks,” thinking less, not more, as the difficulty rises. A stock market crash could wipe out $35 trillion in consumer wealth, according to former International Monetary Fund Deputy Director Gita Gopinath. Institutionalizing, yet lightly regulating, cryptocurrency adds risk uncertainty.

Adding to these risks is the growing role played by unregulated non-bank financial institutions or shadow banks in corporate finance, and in state finance in China, making it difficult to know how much companies are leveraged. An internal probe of First Brands, an auto parts maker that filed for bankruptcy in 2025, examined how it used money that was due from customers to borrow from lenders several times over. First Brands’s collapse was also spurred by the growing weakness of middle-class consumers no longer able to maintain or purchase new vehicles.

The situation is frighteningly reminiscent of what happened in 2007-08, when the holders of cheap mortgages could not keep up their payments. The K-shaped economy, with just the wealthiest 20 percent of U.S. households fueling consumption, is not sustainable. Tariffs are beginning to increase inflation, and low hiring levels have led to an affordability crisis. Trump has few solutions beyond eliminating his own tariffs on food items such as coffee, negotiating with Big Pharma to lower drug costs, and promising $2,000 checks for most Americans that would boost U.S. debt already equaling around 125 percent of GDP, a level unprecedented for peacetime.

A financial crisis this time around could be far more lethal for U.S. power in the world than in 2008. China and the G-20 are unlikely to help a second time. The U.S. dollar, already weakened, would not be the shield it has been without the U.S. taking drastic action to cut spending and raise taxes.

Probability of crisis:
Probability of crisis: A barometer with an arrow pointing to "high"

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (lower middle) poses with world leaders during the BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro on July 7, 2025.Mauro Pimentel/AFP via Getty Images

Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci summed up the 1930s with his famous phrase, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” It’s a description apt for the interregnum between today’s dying liberal order and whatever is to come. It’s not just Trump trashing the ancien régime: Most of the other great powers are out to kill it.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was first out of the gate, waging war on Ukraine to reassert Russia’s interests against NATO. Claiming regional dominance, Xi wants to avenge China’s past century of humiliation, while the global south seeks a greater decision-making role for itself in global affairs. Europe appears paralyzed by its nostalgia for the liberal order, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Trump’s weakening of U.S. security guarantees as stated in his recent National Security Strategy are forcing Europe to arm itself for a realpolitik world.

Yet for many states, multipolarity is the answer. Even U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has admitted that it is inevitable, but there is no plan to ensure the global commons is protected at a time of rising extreme poverty and conflict along with growing climate change impacts.

Just like the global economy, multilateralism is fracturing, with the Trump administration exiting the United States from U.N. organizations such as the World Health Organization and defunding others like the World Food Program by its foreign assistance cuts.

Russia and China are expanding alternative organizations such as BRICS to de-dollarize and create alternative currency systems to the U.S. dollar. The mix of diminished institutions and great-power competition points to a deficit of needed cooperation when the next global pandemic, climate, or financial crisis erupts. Domestically, the discontent is even greater, with inequality growing and Western publics irate that globalization appeared to benefit everyone else.

Young people everywhere are seeing the ladders to the good life being kicked away, with populists seeking simple answers in a complicated, fast-changing world. However powerful they are, both states and individuals see themselves as victims. Xi has publicly

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