MONITORING (SW) – In the year 2024, geopolitical competition increased while the one brief respite from a year with more steps backward than forward came with the 2024 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in Paris, the world’s most beautiful city.
Here are top ten world events in 2024 marked by the think-tank Council on Foreign Affairs .
10. The Space Race Is Alive and Well. Some of the highlights in space exploration in 2024 included: Japan landed a SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon) on a lunar crater in January and transmitted data back to earth for three months.
China sent a mission that brought back soil samples from the far side of the moon; NASA’s Perseverance rover found possible evidence of microbial life on Mars. Similarly, a joint EU-Japan mission photographed the south pole of Mercury and SpaceX demonstrated a new technology for capturing returning booster rockets with “chopstick arms.”
9. The World Braces for China Shock 2.0. China rose from economic backwater to global powerhouse in the early 2000s on the back of exports. But that success came at a cost to others, particularly the United States. Americans got cheaper consumer goods but lost a million manufacturing jobs as domestic producers either shuttered their doors or moved abroad in search of lower-cost labor. Economists called it the China shock and believed it was a one-off event.
But importing countries are more worried that a second China shock will destroy their domestic industry. Washington will almost certainly increase its tariffs even further in 2025. That could fuel greater trade tensions or set the stage for a negotiated solution.
8. The Sudanese Civil War Rages on. The civil war that began in Sudan in April 2023 continued unabated in 2024. The fighting pits the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia, led by Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo. The two men jointly seized power in a coup in October 2021, but eventually had a falling out.
The RSF, which grew out of the infamous Janjaweed that were responsible for the Darfur genocide two decades ago, seized control of Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, as well as much of Darfur. In late September, the SAF launched a major offensive to retake Khartoum. They retook parts of the city but failed to dislodge RSF forces entirely. As the fighting has ground on, the Sudanese people suffered. The exact death toll is unknown. Some estimates put the number at 20,000 killed, with the number rising to more than 60,000 or even higher when war-related disease and starvation are included.
7. Developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) Continue to Astound—and Concern. The AI revolution is turning science fiction into science fact. The list of recent AI advances is impressive, as are their practical applications. AI is being used to analyze genetic conditions, improve healthcare, create manufacturing efficiencies, and more.
The Nobel Prize Committee recognized AI’s importance when it awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to John Hopfield and Geofrey Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks” and half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for developing an “AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures.” As with all revolutionary technologies, experts debate which country is ahead. Most measures suggest that the United States “leads by a wide margin.” China, however, is the global leader in the raw number of AI research publications.
6. Russia Takes the Offensive in Ukraine. The momentum shifted to Russia in the third year of its war on Ukraine. Since July, Russian forces have pushed Ukrainian troops back along the front in eastern Ukraine. The territory Russia has gained with its meat-grinder strategy has come at a high price. Russian casualties likely exceed 115,000 killed and 500,000 wounded. Ukraine, with a population roughly a quarter of Russia’s, has seen 43,000 troops killed and 370,000 wounded.
Kyiv attacked across its northern border in August to seize territory in Russia’s Kursk region. The move sought to force Moscow to redeploy troops away from embattled Ukrainian forces in eastern Ukraine. Russia did not bite, however. It instead secured some 10,000 North Korean troops to fight in Kursk. Calls for a negotiated ceasefire have grown. However, Vladimir Putin’s terms for any agreement seem to be Ukraine’s capitulation.
5. Incumbent Political Parties Take It on the Chin. Incumbents facing the voters in 2025 must be uneasy. Two thousand twenty-four began as the mother of all election years. Some eighty countries representing four billion people held either national, state, or local elections.
In the United Kingdom and the United States, voters sent the incumbent parties packing. French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to call snap parliamentary elections after rightist parties did well in the European parliamentary elections backfired and could cost him his presidency. Germany’s ruling coalition crumbled after its constituent parties fared poorly in state elections in September.
4. The Climate Continues to Heat Up. Humanity cannot say it did not know. Scientists have been warning for decades that our addiction to fossil fuels will change the climate, potentially permanently. The facts back them up. The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continue to grow, and 2024 will go down as the hottest year on record. For the first time, the average global temperature was 1.5° C hotter than during pre-industrial times, a dangerous sign given that the 2015 Paris Agreement seeks to keep the world from breaching that level permanently. Some of the consequences of a changing climate are easy to see.
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that the first ten months of 2024 produced twenty-four weather-related natural disasters in the United States that inflicted at least $1 billion in damage.
3. Upheaval in the Middle East. The events unleashed by Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel reverberated across the Middle East in 2024. Israel continued its war in Gaza. The death toll now exceeds 45,000, and northern Gaza is on the verge of famine. Israel notched numerous tactical victories, including the killing of Hamas leader and October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar. But its strategic objective—defeating Hamas—remained elusive. The weakening of Hamas and Hezbollah created an opening for Turkish-backed forces in Syria to topple the government of Bashar al-Assad in December, which further isolated Iran in the region. The question now is whether these events have laid the groundwork for a future peace or sowed the seeds for even more disorder.
2. The Rise of the Axis of Autocracies. The return of geopolitical competition is evident in the growing cooperation between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Their collaboration has been called the axis of autocracies, the axis of upheaval, and the quartet of chaos, among other names. The alignment falls far short of an alliance, and it is debatable whether “axis” is the best description. Nonetheless, ties among the four are deepening. Iran has sold Russia thousands of drones, North Korea has provided Russia with millions of artillery shells, and China has helped rebuild Russia’s defense industrial base.
1. Donald Trump Wins the U.S. Presidential Election. Trump’s defeat of Democrat Kamala Harris in 2024 will go down as the greatest political comeback in U.S. history. In the wake of the January 6 Capitol Hill riot that even senior members of the Republican Party said he was “morally responsible for,” Trump’s political obituary seemed written. His comeback owed to his unique appeal to Republican base voters, public dissatisfaction with the economy and illegal immigration, and Joe Biden’s low public approval ratings. The re-run of the 2020 election that seemed likely in spring 2024 never materialized. Biden dropped out of the race in July after a disastrous debate that confirmed the doubts many had that he was fit for another four years in office.
