The top ten risks and opportunities for 2021

It’s not being called the “year from hell” for nothing. The pandemic, the kind of “grey swan” event that is predicted but never pinpointed in time, finally came calling in 2020, aggravated by deepening political division and tribalism. International institutions continued to fragment, with the United States withdrawing from the World Health Organization right in the middle of the plague and engaging in obstructionist behavior in other multilateral organizations.

Yet there were rays of light even in the abyss. Democracy prevailed in the US presidential election, even as the US political system remains polarized and dysfunctional. In a surge of spectacular innovation, aided by artificial intelligence and big data, scientists created COVID-19 vaccines with stunning alacrity.

It’s tempting to say that in 2021, there’s nowhere to go but up. But there will be further unanticipated shocks and no shortage of risks. Drawing on years of foresight experience at the US National Intelligence Council, we’ve assessed the knowable and drawn on our best judgment to identify the top ten risks in the new year for the United States in particular, but with global implications. We’ve attached a probability to each potential scenario, with “medium” denoting a 50/50 chance that it will occur in the coming year. The ordering of the risks is by importance for the United States and the rest of the world.

And in the spirit of optimism for the new decade—hope springs eternal, after all—we’ve made an addition this year: ten opportunities in the coming year for the new US administration, beginning with the most important and using the same probability scale for each potential scenario.

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Πηγή: atlanticcouncil.org