With so much of the world already wracked by violent conflict, it is hard to imagine that things could get any worse this year. But that is precisely what many American foreign policy experts fear will happen, according to an annual survey conducted by the Council on Foreign Relations, where I am a senior fellow and director of the Center for Preventive Action.
For the first time since the survey began 16 years ago, three of the 30 conflict-related risks that respondents were asked to assess were judged to be both highly threatening to U.S. interests and highly likely to occur over the next 12 months.
Most shockingly, by far the leading concern for 2024 is not an overseas conflict or foreign threat but a homegrown one: potential domestic terrorism and other forms of political violence in the United States, especially around the upcoming presidential election.
That so many American foreign policy experts now worry about the impact of domestic terrorism and political violence in the United States is telling. Beyond the immediate threat to life and liberty at home, they almost certainly fret over a wider set of risks to U.S. interests.
For a start, America’s ability to promote democracy abroad, which is so important to a more stable and prosperous world, will take an immediate and potentially lasting hit. To state the obvious, it will be hard to advocate for peaceful elections and orderly government transitions in other countries when the United States cannot practice what it preaches. Authoritarian rivals will not miss a beat to highlight the contradiction if not hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy.
More worrisome is the risk that America’s adversaries — whether it’s states or non-state actors — will take advantage of America’s internal divisions to not only sow further discord in the country (particularly through provocative disinformation on social media) but also pursue their local or regional aims to the detriment of U.S. interests.
As the CFR survey’s results also make abundantly clear, this is not a good time for the United States to be distracted by internal political turmoil.
Besides domestic terrorism and political violence, respondents were particularly concerned with two other pressing issues: the potential for the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas to escalate into a wider regional conflict as well as surging migration across the southern border driven in part by criminal violence, economic hardship and political corruption in Mexico and Central America.
And if these concerns are not vexing enough to the United States, others are not far behind in the overall ranking.
The ongoing war in Ukraine, which has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives, could escalate in several very dangerous ways. Likewise, tensions between Taiwan and China that have been steadily rising in recent years could easily morph into open conflict, especially around Taiwan’s upcoming presidential election. The possibility of a military confrontation between Israel and Iran due to the latter’s support for various militant groups in the region along with its continuing interest in acquiring nuclear weapons, also remains a serious concern.
Meanwhile, North Korea shows no sign of becoming any less belligerent toward the United States and now has an arsenal of nuclear weapons to threaten U.S. allies in the region and even U.S. territory.
These conflict-related risks, it should be emphasized, constitute just the top-tier concerns for U.S. policymakers. Experts surveyed 30 plausible contingencies in 2024 and only two of them were considered to have a low probability of occurring.
Clearly, the United States should try to avert the worst from happening through timely preventive action, preferably with help from allies and partners. While this task may appear overwhelming given current trends, it is not foreordained that the world will grow more disorderly.
The United States has demonstrated on many occasions the will and capacity to keep the peace and restore order around the world. This will become nigh on impossible to do, however, if America succumbs to further political polarization and, worse, deadly violence in 2024. In this sense, conflict prevention must now begin at home.
Paul B. Stares is the General John Vessey senior fellow in conflict prevention and director of the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of “Preventive Engagement: How America Can Avoid War, Stay Strong, and Keep the Peace.” Follow him at @PaulBStares.