It triggers global nuclear war AND populism.

Manifestations of economic malaise—stagnant growth, stagnant employment numbers and job losses—will have disturbing political consequences. They can lead to political extremism, usually under the guise of right-wing populism, but the left-wing version shares some commonalities. When populism reaches a fever pitch, it tends to vilify pluralistic values associated with liberal democracy and rule of law. Populists of both extremes are united in their callousness or antipathy toward foreigners and against domestic elites. That creates an opening for authoritarian demagogues who denounce their political opponents as elitists, and embrace prejudice against disadvantaged minorities, while praising redistribution of wealth from rich to poor not based on the rule of law, as in China and Russia.

In emerging markets—leaving aside outright dictatorships in some of the poorest countries—authoritarians now run governments in Russia, Belarus, Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines, Brazil, Venezuela, Kazakhstan and China, among others. Cascading megathreats will only make that list grow longer.

Latin American nations flirted for decades with populism on the left and right. For a time, after the end of the Cold War, it looked like representative democracy would prevail in many parts of that region. Yet hard times have handed populists a hefty axe to grind. Their recent resurgence has changed the region’s face. Promising democracies have succumbed. Mexico took a populist turn in 2018 with the election of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, its sixty-fifth president. Left-wing populists won presidential elections in 2021 in Chile and Peru, and in 2022 in Colombia. Experts expect elections in 2022 in Brazil to go the same way.

Brazil turned to the semi-authoritarian president Jair Bolsonaro who, in January 2022, thumbed his nose at liberal democracies by planning a trip to meet Vladimir Putin as Russia amassed troops on the border with Ukraine.- And Latin America is not unique. Years of mediocre growth make South Africa—and other parts of Africa—candidates for populism and authoritarian regimes. India, in a perennial struggle to make life bearable for an impoverished population, is still a democracy and a modernizing economy but has some political forces who openly disdain Muslims, independent democratic institutions and the rule of law. This trend is not our friend, and it’s just getting started.

“At the extremes,” Anne Applebaum warned in the November 2021 issue of the Atlantic, “this kind of contempt can devolve into what the international democracy activist Srdja Popovic calls the ‘Maduro model’ of governance, which may be what Lukashenko is preparing for in Belarus. Autocrats who adopt it are ‘willing to pay the price of becoming a totally failed country, to see their country enter the category of failed states,’ accepting economic collapse, isolation, and mass poverty if that’s what it takes to stay in power.

Advanced democracies are vulnerable as well. Populist arguments yanked Britain out of the European Union, as voters went for Brexit. In the United States, populists elected Donald Trump and his allies. We see growing support in advanced countries for right-wing parties that oppose the European Union, immigration, and rescue packages for indebted countries. France, the historical bastion of liberty, equality, and brotherhood, has grown increasingly receptive to the anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant appeal of the recent presidential candidate Marine LePen; she lost the presidential election in 2022 but her nativist message is still popular as economic malaise worsens for those left behind.

For years, political division and polarization, lack of bipartisanship, partisan radicalization, the rise of extreme right-wing groups, and conspiracy theories have been growing and severely dividing the United States. These trends reached one peak after the 2020 election spawned the fiction that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. Lack of evidence notwithstanding, most of his base went along with him. The January 6, 2021, attempted coup revealed a vast base of radicalized white supremacists and other extreme right-wing militia willing to use force to prevent the electoral vote count in Congress and the rightful installation of Joe Biden as president.

Unfolding megathreats and the rising tide of populism will partly decide the 2022 midterm elections in the United States. Debt, inflation, globalization, immigration, climate change, and the rise of China alarm swing voters. Observers predict angry contests and even violence that may threaten to overturn outcomes in the 2024 presidential election.- Conspiracy theories, massive misinformation campaigns, large-scale violence, coup, insurrection, civil war, secession, and insurgency are now terms used in a large number of op-eds, essays, and books. Collectively, we are thinking the once unthinkable.

The 2024 presidential campaign is drawing close. The New York Tinies calls “the prospect of American political conflagration—including insurrection, secession, insurgency and civil war”—a serious threat.- Numerous authors have raised the possibility of a “slow-moving coup,” the pundit Bill Maher told his HBO audience. Writing in The Nation, a left-of-center publication, Robert Crawford predicts a “worst case scenario” for the United States. Chauncey DeVega, in Salon, and British journalist Sir Max Hastings, have voiced concern about secession or large-scale political violence instigated by the loser’s cadres. Titles like How Civil Wars Start, by political scientist Barbara F. Walter, and The Next Civil War, by journalist Stephen Marche, mince no words. In January 2021, after the assault on the Capitol, a poll showed that 46 percent of Americans had the view that their country was headed toward another civil war.- A CIA task force reached the conclusion that “the United States during the Trump presidency regressed, for the first time since 1800, into “anocracy.” That’s how scholars label a system of government that hovers uneasily between democracy and autocracy.—

Like nuclear meltdowns, megathreats turn all matter in their path into fuel. The economic malaise and rising inequality that leads to populism will spur a backlash against free trade and globalization. The fundamental aspect of populist economic policy is economic nationalism and autarkic tendencies. The rise of political and economic populism exacerbates the risk of deglobalization, protectionism, fragmentation of the global economy, balkanization of global supply chains, restrictions to migration, controls of movement of capital, technology, and data, and severe friction between the United States and China.

Dystopian upheaval will turn science inside out. Technology’s dark side threatens Western values. Social media produces echo chambers as news and postings keep a specious rumor mill in high gear, often to advance interests of foreign adversaries. Conspiracy theories—even demonstrably lunatic ones—travel with alarming speed. Initially seen as a tool to launch and organize dissent against autocratic regimes that traffic in lies and hypocrisy (do you remember the Arab Spring, and the Facebook-generated protests against the Egyptian government?), social media today increasingly foments assaults on democratic institutions and orchestrates ethnic violence. Look no further than the January 6 Capitol mob in the United States or the Rohingya massacre in Myanmar. These trends will accelerate as artificial intelligence and machine learning refine ways—via “transformers” technologies—to manipulate minds.

Technology will become autocracy’s handmaiden. Social media and big tech help current autocrats and dictators hold power. The idea that technology would expose authoritarians to justice and defend democracy now sounds naive.— China uses a Great Firewall and other social media tools to control its population in Orwellian ways. A “social credit rating system” restricts access to financial services and punishes socially and politically “deviant” behavior. Now China is exporting these technologies to client regimes, reinforcing autocracy elsewhere.

Unfettered computerization will make jobs vanish, and not just routine, repetitive jobs. Artificial intelligence advancing at warp speed will make cognitive workers obsolete, from Uber drivers, paralegals, and auditors, to eventually brain surgeons. Robots will also populate creative jobs once we reach a point where machines outthink people. Even computer developers will find their seats occupied by robots. Permanent blue- and white-collar technological displacement will extend unemployment lines, adding pressure to a fraying social safety net. Adding irony to injury, robots are already running most HR decisions and will run unemployment offices.

Who controls AI will command enormous economic, financial, and geopolitical power. That is why the United States and China are vying to dominate the industries of the future. And if the United States and China ever enter into open warfare, their respective AI technologies could make the difference between victory and defeat.

To assert control in a world unsettled by megathreats, major powers will reinforce or reshuffle alliances. China's informal geopolitical partnerships with revisionist powers such as Russia, Iran, and North Korea are challenging the United States and the West. The United States is reinforcing and building new alliances in Asia: the Quad, the AUKUS (a security agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), the Indo Pacific Economic Framework, and now NATO flexing its military muscle in Asia. Revisionist powers challenging the United States and the West cannot yet match Western military strength. The United States alone spends more on military resources than its four revisionist adversaries combined. Those adversaries will increasingly counter American strength with asymmetric warfare that deploys cyber espionage, cyberattacks, and misinformation campaigns to weaken and polarize the United States and the West. But traditional hard power conflict on controlling land masses will not disappear, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the looming conflict over Taiwan show.

Indeed, their logistical disadvantage won’t prevent America’s adversaries from aiming conventional weapons at the United States and the West. Putin’s Russia seeks to partially restore the former Soviet empire by projecting a sphere of influence over former Soviet and Iron Curtain nations; the bloody invasion of Ukraine is a starting salvo of Russia’s attempt to re-create the Soviet Union or its sphere of influence on its “near abroad.” Similar tensions will mount in the Baltics, Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and parts of Central Asia, such as Kazakhstan.

Then there’s North Korea, where sanctions only embolden a mercurial dear leader who demands adoration from a starving people while he embraces long-range missiles and cyberwarfare. In the Middle East, Iran may soon aim nuclear warheads at Israel and Arab states that challenge its dominance; but Israel may try to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities before the country reaches the nuclear point of no return. War in the Gulf would trigger a stagflationary shock from rising oil prices more calamitous than twin spikes produced in the seventies. So many flash points and rivals jockeying for leadership amid geopolitical instability make skirmishes inevitable. They make conventional wars likely, and the horrifying specter of nuclear war possible. In 2022, the war in Ukraine led to risk of its escalation to the Baltics and Central Europe and even a military and nuclear confrontation between Russia and NATO. The specter of nuclear wars—that seemed faded once the Soviet Union collapsed—returned as the war in Ukraine escalated.