International issues to watch in 2023

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/12/2022 (1350 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After two years consumed by pandemic uncertainty, global attention in 2022 shifted toward runaway inflation, seismic geopolitical ruptures and intertwined energy and food crises. History shows predicting the future can be futile, but as the calendar turns to 2023, here are several issues that may dominate the headlines in the year ahead:

The war in Ukraine seems assured to continue for some time, with recent reports indicating Vladimir Putin remains undeterred in his disastrous attempt to annihilate Ukraine’s sovereignty. Experts generally foresee one of three scenarios happening as a result.

The first is that Ukrainian ingenuity and western weapons lead to more breakthroughs in liberating territory in eastern Ukraine, annexed by Russia in fake referendums held last September, similar to surprise offensives that re-took the cities of Kharkiv and Kherson.

Alternatively, if the hundreds of thousands of military reservists mobilized by Putin in the fall become an effective fighting force capable of utilizing munitions imported from North Korea and drones from Iran, it could enable Russia to fortify front-line defences and make its own incremental gains into Ukraine.

Or the two sides spiral into a protracted stalemate; Russia fails to capture new territory while Ukraine is unable to expel ever more deeply entrenched Russian forces.

In this case, outcomes may hinge on whether western support for Ukraine can be sustained in the face of grinding economic fallout for Europe, and whether Putin can manage the palace intrigue unfolding around the Kremlin — possibly by escalating the conflict for the sake of his own survival.

Meanwhile, China’s ruling Communist Party — Russia’s most important backer — now finds itself in uncharted waters, having abandoned its draconian zero-COVID policy in the face of a startling wave of public protest in December.

On the one hand, China seems destined for a national public-health crisis. Modelling suggests between one and two million people could die from COVID-19 in China as a result of restrictions being lifted, given the country’s low vaccination rate, lack of hospital capacity and reliance on ineffective domestically produced vaccines.

Political consequences also loom large. Having reluctantly bowed to public pressure over COVID-19, Beijing may soon reassert its totalitarian power by cracking down in a different, highly visible way.

Another autocratic regime facing unprecedented challenges is in Iran, where women-led protests have morphed into a whole-of-society rejection of the country’s theocratic dictatorship and show no signs of slowing down, even as protesters are now being executed.

At the same time, Tehran’s clerical elite could be plunged into a succession crisis at any moment, given the ailing health of octogenarian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Elsewhere, Iranian drones helped turn the tide of conflict last year in favour of Ethiopia’s central government in its brutal fight against rebels from the northern Tigray region. The two sides signed a peace agreement in early November, ending for now what has been one of the worst wars of the 21st century.

Implementation of the deal will be hard — soldiers from neighbouring Eritrea and opportunistic local militias are already playing the role of spoilers. Once one of Africa’s most promising countries and home to the headquarters of the African Union, Ethiopia’s stability has an outsized impact on the trajectory of Africa, a continent that has immense importance for the world economy going forward.

Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump has for a long time shown an uncanny ability to evade consequences for his actions. Will 2023 be the year in which the political contradictions and legal woes of the former U.S. president finally catch up to him?

When asked in a recent poll who they would prefer as their 2024 presidential candidate, Republican respondents favoured Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over Trump by a margin of 23 per cent. But Republican insiders say DeSantis has many flaws, and anticipate Trump will lash out at his former protégé in an ugly way if the former president feels his stranglehold on the GOP is loosening.

This will all happen as central banks’ inflation-fighting measures begin to bite after months of lag time, possibly triggering a recession in industrialized nations and a cascade of debt crises in emerging markets.

Climate change will intensify as well, although the green energy transition is likewise gaining pace. Twitter, under Elon Musk, could either collapse or become a muddled replicant of messaging platform competitor Telegam. And then there is the accelerating evolution and disruption of artificial intelligence.

However, with all this being said, perhaps the only guarantee for 2023 is that there will be a major event that no one sees coming.

Kyle Hiebert is a Winnipeg-based researcher and analyst, and former deputy editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor