Ten international headlines you’ll see in the new year
My oh my, could life get better? Here is the future in one snappy package.
To discover what in the world will happen this coming year, why torture yourself for 12 hair-raising, cliffhanging, spinetingling and bloodcurdling months?
Instead, I offer you not my personal wish list — but predictions for the year ahead. Drumroll please. Here is a confidential peek at the Top 10 international headlines of 2020.
1. Trump resigns to get a pardon
After being impeached, Donald Trump will survive in the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate, but will be mortally wounded politically. He will face inevitable defeat in next November’s presidential election and his Democratic rivals will threaten Trump with criminal charges once out of office. Since nothing frightens him more than the prospect of end
ing up in jail, Trump’s family will convince him to condemn the “system” as being corrupt and do what Richard Nixon did in 1974: resign in exchange for a presidential pardon.
2. Biden and Harris elected next November
As in 2016, the Democrats are more than capable of losing to Donald Trump in the presidential election — but this time, miraculously, they won’t. Four years of chaotic presidential rule will be too much in today’s broken America, and sheer exhaustion will push the country’s political calculus back to the mushy middle. However flawed and uninspiring, Joe Biden will win the Democratic nomination — with a clear understanding he will serve only one term — and he will move to recapture the party’s Black voters by choosing California Sen. Kamala Harris for vicepresident. They will narrowly win in November against the Republican ticket of Mike Pence and Nikki Haley.
3. The year the planet roared back
Decades from now, there will be utter horror at why so many of us living now seemed indifferent as our planet caught fire and burned. But there are increasing signs the climate crisis is finally becoming the leading global issue. The year 2020 will be the turning point when the planet — and the younger generation who will inherit it — finally fight back, and it will be just in time. Scientists have given us a deadline of 2030 to cut carbon emissions if the Earth is to avoid the most lethal effects of global warming.
4. Back to the brink with North Korea
Love affairs can often end in acrimony and bitterness, but rarely does the risk of nuclear war become part of the mess left behind. However, that seems to be the fate of Donald Trump’s bizarre
“loving” relationship with Kim Jong Un. It has been described by Trump as his biggest foreign policy achievement, but that is a delusion. Their understanding is actually ending in tears. North Korea is breaking off its nuclear talks with the U.S. and will return in 2020 to a potentially dangerous posture of nuclear threat and provocation.
5. Brexit Britain, divided and diminished
The U.K. is now certain to leave the European Union by the end of January, but does this mean the Conservatives will “get Brexit done,” as voters were promised? Of course not. The real negotiations with the EU will only now begin, and the Europeans will have the upper hand. Meanwhile, Britain’s promised deal with Trump’s America will vanish for now as the presidential election takes over. In other words, the benefits from Year One of a Brexit Britain will be nil.
6. Netanyahu era finally ends
Although it has been an agonizingly long goodbye, the end of the Benjamin Netanyahu era in Israeli politics is near. On March 2, Israeli voters will take part in their third general election in less than a year and this will mean that Netanyahu will soon be history. He was indicted last month on charges of fraud, bribery and breach of trust, and many legal analysts believe he will eventually wind up in jail. But the Israel he leaves behind will be divided and unpredictable.
7. Iran caught in the crosshairs
Aided and abetted by a Trump Middle East strategic policy that seems empty at its core, the possibility of war with Iran is at its highest level in years. And this coming year is certain to see many provocations, if not outright conflict. The U.S. has essentially withdrawn from the region and encouraged the region’s rivals — Israel, Saudi Arabia and the hardliners in Iran itself — to sort it out. And that, as we shall see in the year ahead, will be a recipe for disaster.
8. Welcome back, Taliban
The United States and the Taliban are about to conclude an agreement that will supposedly end the 18-year civil war in Afghanistan. It will be hailed by the Trump administration as a diplomatic victory, but it will be nothing of the sort. Essentially, without using this language, Trump’s America wants to cut-and-run and dramatically reduce its support of Afghanistan, and this will happen. The result in the coming year is that the Taliban will gradually regain its power over the country. According to the U.S. Defense Department, the total American expenditure in Afghanistan since 2001 was $760 billion (U.S.).
9. Return of nuclear arms race
It was a threat to global peace that supposedly had receded in the latter stages of the 20th century, but that is proving not to be so. The world is stumbling once again into a dangerous new era in which the potential use of nuclear weapons is genuine. The arms control agreements in place since the Cold
War appear to be coming undone. Many of the world’s current leaders are indifferent, or ignorant of the threat. And smaller countries, led by expansionist authoritarian leaders, see the possibility for the first time to acquire nuclear weapons.
10. Latin America explodes
Beyond the political implosion of Venezuela, the popular protests spreading throughout Latin America are certain to increase in the coming year. In both Central and South America, the stability of many countries has been put into question by these protests. They have been triggered by a wide assortment of grievances — such as growing economic inequality, high fuel and transportation costs, examples of electoral fraud and government corruption. Even Chile, normally a stable nation, has been racked by deadly riots that have compelled the country’s president to declare a state of emergency.
My track record
In the past three years, I have made 30 predictions for 2017, 2018 and 2019.
Using my own process of scoring — which, in the spirit of the Trump era, I proudly declare is self-serving, narcissistic and highly suspect — I have given myself a passing grade on 21 of 28 predictions, with two of them for 2019 still too early to call.
This year, I was right (more or less) on six out of eight predictions (regarding North Korea, China, Europe’s far right and Saudi Arabia).
I was wrong in predicting that U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller would conclude that Donald Trump was “illegitimate” and that Brexit would be “reversed” in a second vote.
I was right that Trump would be impeached, but a bit premature in predicting he would “resign to avoid jail.”
However, looking forward to that prospect in 2020 will make this a very happy new year.