Risks and opportunities 2019: The biggest risks

Outlook

The contest between China and the United States is crystallising into the most critical bilateral relationship of the first quarter of the 21st century. In 2019, it will be shaped by Donald Trump’s ever more self-assured prosecution of his ‘America First’ presidency and Xi Jinping’s vision of China-led global governance.

Autocratic-leaning leaders, if lesser lights, are also to be seen in Russia, Turkey, India, Hungary, Italy and elsewhere. The concomitant fragmentation of existing nodes of power will allow populism to continue to flourish and cut the centrist ground from beneath the ruling elites.

At the same time, profound and long-term forces of change are at work: from demography to urbanisation but most of all, technology that may leave the strong, mercantilist and nationalist ‘big–man’ leader stranded on the shore of history.

Impacts

• EU governments will struggle to deal with highly viral, a-democratic, superficially unstructured and leaderless populist protests.
• Beijing will energetically pursue trade agreements with third countries in order to outflank Washington.
• Moscow will respond to US scepticism on nuclear arms deals with belligerent rhetoric and new missiles, but also efforts to save treaties.