{"id":26310,"date":"2024-12-31T05:47:31","date_gmt":"2024-12-31T05:47:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/?p=26310"},"modified":"2024-12-31T05:47:31","modified_gmt":"2024-12-31T05:47:31","slug":"2024-leaves-behind-a-legacy-of-heightened-geopolitical-rivalry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/2024\/12\/2024-leaves-behind-a-legacy-of-heightened-geopolitical-rivalry\/","title":{"rendered":"2024 leaves behind a legacy of heightened geopolitical rivalry"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s most beautiful city. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Here are top ten world events in 2024 marked by the think-tank Council on Foreign Affairs .<\/p>\n

10.\u00a0The Space Race Is Alive and Well.<\/b> 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.<\/p>\n

China sent a mission that brought back soil samples from the far side of the moon; NASA\u2019s\u202fPerseverance 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 \u201cchopstick arms.\u201d<\/p>\n

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9.\u00a0The World Braces for China Shock 2.0.<\/b>\u00a0China rose from economic backwater to global powerhouse in the early 2000s\u00a0on 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\u00a0China shock and believed it was a one-off event.<\/p>\n

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.\u202fThat could fuel greater trade tensions or set the stage for a negotiated solution.<\/p>\n

8.\u00a0The Sudanese Civil War Rages on.<\/b>\u00a0The civil war that began in Sudan in April 2023 continued unabated in 2024. The fighting\u00a0pits\u00a0the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia, led by Mohamed Hamdan \u201cHemedti\u201d Dagalo. The two men jointly seized power in a coup in October 2021, but eventually had a falling out.<\/p>\n

The RSF, which grew out of the infamous Janjaweed that were responsible for the\u00a0Darfur genocide\u00a0two decades ago, seized control of Sudan\u2019s capital, Khartoum, as well as much of Darfur. In late September, the SAF\u00a0launched a major offensive\u00a0to 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\u00a020,000 killed, with the number rising to\u00a0more than 60,000\u00a0or even higher when war-related disease and starvation are included.<\/p>\n

7.\u00a0Developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) Continue to Astound\u2014and Concern.<\/b>\u00a0The AI revolution is turning science fiction into science fact. The\u00a0list of recent AI advances\u00a0is impressive, as are their practical applications. AI is being used to\u00a0analyze genetic conditions,\u00a0improve healthcare,\u00a0create manufacturing efficiencies, and more.<\/p>\n

The Nobel Prize Committee recognized AI\u2019s 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 \u201cAI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins\u2019 complex structures.\u201d As with all revolutionary technologies, experts debate which country is ahead. Most measures suggest that the United States \u201cleads by a wide margin.\u201d China, however, is the global leader in the raw number of AI research publications.<\/p>\n

6.\u00a0Russia Takes the Offensive in Ukraine.<\/b>\u00a0The 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\u00a0meat-grinder strategy\u00a0has come at a high price. Russian casualties likely exceed\u00a0115,000 killed\u00a0and 500,000 wounded. Ukraine, with a population roughly a quarter of Russia\u2019s, has seen\u00a043,000 troops killed\u00a0and 370,000 wounded.<\/p>\n

Kyiv attacked across its northern border in August to seize territory in Russia\u2019s 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\u00a0some 10,000 North Korean troops to fight in Kursk.\u00a0Calls for a\u00a0negotiated ceasefire\u00a0have grown. However, Vladimir Putin\u2019s\u00a0terms for any agreement\u00a0seem to be Ukraine\u2019s capitulation.<\/p>\n

5.\u00a0Incumbent Political Parties Take It on the Chin.<\/b>\u00a0Incumbents facing the voters in 2025 must be uneasy. Two thousand twenty-four began as\u00a0the mother of all election years. Some eighty countries representing four billion people\u202fheld\u00a0either national, state, or local elections.<\/p>\n

In the United Kingdom and the United States, voters sent the incumbent parties packing.\u202fFrench President Emmanuel Macron\u2019s decision to call snap parliamentary elections after rightist parties did well in the European parliamentary elections backfired and could cost him his presidency. Germany\u2019s ruling coalition crumbled after its constituent parties fared poorly in state elections in September.<\/p>\n

4.\u00a0The Climate Continues to Heat Up<\/b>. 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\u00a0hottest year\u00a0on record. For the first time, the average global temperature\u00a0was 1.5\u00b0 C hotter\u00a0than 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.<\/p>\n

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that the first ten months of 2024 produced\u00a0twenty-four weather-related natural disasters in the United States that inflicted at least $1 billion in damage.<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0Upheaval in the Middle East.<\/b>\u00a0The events unleashed by Hamas\u2019s October 2023 attack on Israel reverberated across the Middle East in 2024. Israel continued its war in Gaza. The death toll now\u00a0exceeds 45,000, and northern Gaza is on the\u00a0verge of famine. Israel notched numerous tactical victories, including the killing of Hamas leader and October 7 mastermind\u00a0Yahya Sinwar. But its strategic objective\u2014defeating Hamas\u2014remained 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\u00a0isolated Iran\u00a0in 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.<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0The Rise of the Axis of Autocracies.\u00a0<\/b>The return of geopolitical competition is evident in the growing cooperation between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Their collaboration has been called the\u00a0axis of autocracies, the\u202faxis of upheaval, and the\u202fquartet of chaos, among other names. The alignment falls far short of an alliance, and it is debatable whether \u201caxis\u201d is\u00a0the 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\u2019s defense industrial base.<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0Donald Trump Wins the U.S. Presidential Election.<\/b>\u00a0Trump\u2019s 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\u00a0said\u00a0he was \u201cmorally responsible for,\u201d Trump\u2019s political obituary seemed written. His comeback owed to his unique appeal to Republican base voters,\u00a0public dissatisfaction\u00a0with the economy and illegal immigration, and Joe Biden\u2019s 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\u00a0disastrous debate that confirmed the doubts many had that he was fit for another four years in office.<\/p>\n

ENDS<\/strong><\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s most beautiful city.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":26313,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[990,1,16,194,899,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest","category-0_swnen","category-report","category-world","category-trending","category-headline"],"views":56,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26310"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26314,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26310\/revisions\/26314"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swn.af\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}