2023: What’s the Worst That Could Happen?

Why It Matters

Council on Foreign Relations

News

4.2 • 876 Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2023

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The world is entering a new era of great-power competition. As U.S. policymakers look ahead, it pays to know what global threats to anticipate. Every January, the Council on Foreign Relations publishes a survey that analyzes the conflicts most likely to occur in the twelve months ahead and rates their potential impact on the United States. But can the country prepare itself for mass immigration, cyberwarfare, and nuclear tensions while still cooperating with adversaries on global issues such as climate change? Read the full 2023 Preventive Priorities Survey. Check out the Center for Preventive Action’s Global Conflict Tracker. Featured Guest: Paul B. Stares (General John W. Vessey Senior Fellow for Conflict Prevention and Director of the Center for Preventive Action) For an episode transcript and show notes, visit us at https://www.cfr.org/podcasts/2023-whats-worst-could-happen

Transcript

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0:00.0	The global order is being utterly transformed.
0:06.0	If we are more adaptive, imaginative and collaborative in our approaches to preparedness and resilience, we'll be able to better anticipate and respond to emerging risks.
0:16.0	We will not leave our future vulnerable to the whims of those who do not share our vision for a world that is free, open, prosperous, and secure.
0:25.0	We meet tonight in an afflection point, one of those moments that only a few generations
0:30.2	ever face, but the direction we now take is going to decide the course of
0:36.4	this nation for decades to come. Hey everyone, we've returned.
0:45.0	We've returned.
0:48.6	We ended our last season of Why It Matters with an episode that looked back over 2022. This season, we're
0:54.7	starting out by looking ahead. It's something that think tanks spend a lot of
0:58.9	time doing, scanning the horizon, searching for emerging threats and thinking about how to prepare for them.
1:05.2	Lucky for me, I work around a lot of people who are very good at this.
1:10.0	In fact, every year the council publishes a report called the Preventive Priorities Survey.
1:16.0	It's a little bit like those top 10 lists you find all over the internet, except instead of
1:20.8	songs from the 90s, it rates global threats to the United States.
1:24.8	This year there are 30 threats on the list, including seven so-called tier one threats.
1:30.8	For years the survey was dominated by concerns about terrorism.
1:35.0	But now the 9-11 era has receded into the rearview mirror,
1:39.0	and we're moving into a new phase,
1:41.0	one that's going to require entirely new strategies. new the survey Paul Stairs about what we might face in 2023 and the nature of
1:55.8	predictions in a turbulent world. So this is something that we've been doing now for 15 years. The wonky name for
2:10.6	it would be a crowd source risk assessment but essentially it's a survey of
2:16.8	several thousand American foreign policy experts.
	...

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