International Forecast for 2024
Come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly away.
If you could use some exotic booze, there’s a bar in far Bombay.
Come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly away.
Come fly with me, let’s float down to Peru.
In llama land, there’s a one-man band, and he’ll toot his flute for you.
Come fly with me, let’s take off in the blue.
Pack up let’s fly away!”
Come Fly with Me - Frank Sinatra (1958)
…..
This will be the last in my series of 2024 forecasts. We have covered the election, the economy, society, and culture. Now it is time to look across the oceans and gaze into the fog of the future. I will also make a foreign policy suggestion which is far out of the consensus of political thinking at the moment. Chaos, which is the premise of this blog, abounds overseas every bit as much or more than it does in the United States.
Prior to 2021, there was no war in Ukraine and no major war in the Middle East. Kim Jong-Un was being quiet, and China was not being too provocative. The people of Afghanistan had some modicum of freedom, and no Americans were dying there. All this changed after Biden became president.
Coincidence? Absolutely not. Biden has wanted to be the “peace president.” He planned to get out of wars we were in and not enter any new ones. But peace has never resulted from a policy of weakness. You stay out of wars when you are prepared to fight them, not when your enemy knows you won’t. Biden must look at 1930s British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain as his mentor. If so, he may have “achieved” even more than the master in this case.
Biden is clearly not changing anything in this approach, despite its evident failure. Therefore, it is pretty clear that he will do anything, including allow the enemy to kill Americans, disrupt international trade and markets, kill allies and succeed in some objectives in order to avoid a wider conflict. My base case forecast is that none of the conflicts in the world will erupt into a major regional or world war this year, but they will rise in number and intensity as the vacuum of American leadership is filled by others.
Let’s take a quick run around the globe.
Ukraine: Biden will not get the funding he wants for more weapons for Ukraine because he will not agree to secure the border. So, the Europeans will take up the slack, to the extent they can. The war will continue in a stalemate, which gives the advantage to Russia because they are good at wars of attrition and Ukraine will run low on weapons and men.
Middle East: As I write this on the morning of January 31st, Americans have now died from attacks by Iran’s proxies and the Biden administration has not yet declared how they will respond. Biden will not widen the war. Iran wants the U.S. to exit the region so that they can face Israel alone. Rather than respond aggressively, I suspect that Biden’s response will be timid and he will withdraw forces from harm’s way slowly over time. Biden’s main objective right now is to be reelected. Obama allowed four Americans to die in Benghazi in pursuit of his reelection in 2012 and Biden will do the same. If Biden is reelected, he will eventually pull out of the region and leave Israel to stand alone as Britain had to in 1941. Iran got the money they wanted and they will get more from a second Biden term. Support for Israel was bipartisan and nearly unanimous when I was in Congress. I suspect it will be entirely partisan in the near future.
Taiwan/China: The CCP has lots of problems at home right now. Their economy is in shambles and there is unrest around the vast land. They will continue to posture about Taiwan but not attack or blockade. Regimes sometimes create external conflicts to unite the people against a foreign power and hope they forget about domestic problems. But that can be a high-risk strategy that sometimes topples the government that does that. Ask Czar Nicholas how his entry into World War I went. In spite of the fact that Biden would likely do nothing in the event of an attack, I think it is too big a risk for Xi Jinping right now.
Europe: The German economy is in trouble. It appears to be a secular rather than a cyclical problem. Merkel, who may have been the worst German Chancellor since…oh you know…the guy with the mustache, has destroyed much German ingenuity and innovation with the world’s most aggressive push into uneconomic and unreliable “green” energy. The UK will most likely elect a Labor government this year, simply because the people want change. But this could turn out like the last time the Brits did this. That was in 1974 when they threw out the Tory government due to bad economic conditions just like today. But the replacement Labor governments of Wilson and Callaghan made things dramatically worse. That led to Margaret Thatcher’s ascendance to save the country. I suspect we are seeing a similar pattern pay out now. Today’s leftist Labor party will only make things worse.
Africa: Have you noticed what South Africa is doing? They are supporting Hamas. Not just a little bit. They are supporting a one-state solution, Palestine, which means they are basically in favor of getting rid of all the Jews. This is the country that supposedly is so virtuous due to its overthrow of apartheid. But, I guess apartheid is OK as long as the people in charge are black or Muslim. On and by the way, there seems to be a genocide of white farmers in South Africa too, and the government doesn’t really care. South Africa will be just like Zimbabwe soon. Will the Biden administration push back on any of this or remove aid to South Africa? Of course not. Critical Race Theory won’t permit that.
United States Border: This is an international issue because of the masses of foreigners from all over the world pouring into our country with no vetting whatsoever. We are on track so that by the end of this year, Biden will have allowed 8 million illegal and unknown aliens to enter the United States in his four years. That is about the population of my home state of Arizona, which has more people than 36 other states. I’m sure some of these people will go to work and be stable people. But if only 1% of them are bad, we have 80,000 new criminals and terrorists that will harm American and Americans starting next year.
There’s more I could talk about in South America (Venezuela wanting to take over Guyana, new president of Argentina) Australia, India, and other places. It is a big world after all. But let me transition into that out of the consensus thought.
In 1972, President Nixon (America’s most underrated president in my opinion) visited and “opened” China. This was not an altruistic move. The Soviet Union was the major threat to world peace at the time and he did not want the two communist countries becoming allies against the west. It worked, and we all know how it played out.
Today, the west faces three major threats – China, Russia, and Islamic extremism. The actions of the Biden administration are pushing these three enemies together. They are not at all natural allies. But, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. I do not think we can effectively fight this three-front war either kinetically or rhetorically.
Islamic fundamentalism is antithetical to the Judeo/Christian west. The Chinese Communist Party is basically the Soviet Union of today and unreconcilable without regime change. But Russians are not that different from Europeans, Americans, Australians, and the like. If a 2nd term President Trump were to engage in a Nixon-like reproachment with the Russians, maybe they could become allies against the others instead of complicit with them. I know that Putin is a bully. But so were Mao Zedong and Stalin and we had productive alliances with them at one time. Arguably, Putin is less onerous than they were.
What we are doing is not working and is setting up for more problems down the road. Time to shake it up a bit.
And I have a “President Nixon” bumper sticker from his reelect on my 1977 Buick Riviera. I wear it proudly.
You can now follow me on X (formerly Twitter) @lookthruchaos. (www.twitter.com)
And you can listen to me every Monday morning at 8:30 AM Eastern time on the Hugh Hewitt show on your local radio station or on the Hugh Hewitt Show podcast.
I remain respectfully,
Congressman John Campbell
Drive Fast & Live Free