3. Expect a Chinese military offensive against Taiwan
Recently, US officials have been warning that China could launch a military campaign to reunify Taiwan with the mainland on a faster-than-anticipated schedule between now and 2027. And our survey results support that dire assessment. Fully 70 percent of respondents agree—though just 12 percent strongly agree—that China will seek to forcibly retake Taiwan within the next ten years. Only around two in ten don’t believe that such a scenario will occur. Intriguingly, among government employees, the figures rise to near certainty: Eighty-eight percent agree that China will use force against Taiwan, just 8 percent disagree, and the remaining 4 percent do not know.
Many people are currently focused on the risk of Russia engaging in a direct fight with the United States and NATO. But notably, even in the throes of a hot war in Ukraine right on NATO’s borders, the majority of respondents (more than 60 percent) disagreed with the notion that there will be such a Russia-NATO military clash within the next ten years—perhaps suggesting a belief that the conflict in Ukraine can be contained to that country or that the war has exposed Russia as too weak to take the fight directly to NATO. Given that a Chinese military assault on Taiwan would likely prompt the United States to intervene in support of the island, and that respondents were far more inclined to see a China-Taiwan conflict as probable than a Russia-NATO conflict, the biggest impending risk of war between great powers might be in Asia, not Europe.
4. US-Chinese decoupling may not be as dramatic as we think it will be
There has been a lot of talk about “decoupling,” or efforts to disentangle the US and Chinese economies. But the experts we surveyed delivered a clear verdict: Full-blown decoupling is very unlikely. Despite all the geopolitical tensions and tit-for-tat trade restrictions between the two countries, the most likely outcome (according to roughly 40 percent of respondents) is that the US and Chinese economies will be “somewhat less” interdependent in 2033 than they are today. Moreover, of those who believe China will use force against Taiwan, 64 percent predict at least some decline in economic interdependence—a surprisingly low number given how drastic a move a Chinese military campaign against Taiwan would be. Fully 22 percent of those expecting Chinese use of force against Taiwan believe that the US and Chinese economies will become more interdependent by 2033.
Overall, 58 percent of respondents forecast less economic interdependence between the two countries by 2033 and just 23 percent expect more. US respondents are slightly more convinced about this direction of travel, with 64 percent anticipating a drop in interdependence (24 percent still anticipate an increase).
Just as important, though, roughly eight in ten respondents—both overall and among Americans—expect any change in either direction to be limited at most. The widespread expectation, then, is a slow decoupling.
5. The United States will remain powerful but not hegemonic
Respondents generally expressed a belief in the United States’ staying power over the next ten years, though many envisioned a country preeminent in some domains of national clout but not others. Seven in ten foresee the United States continuing to be the world’s dominant military power by 2033—a notably high percentage given concerns about China’s military modernization and the United States losing its military edge—while about half think the United States will maintain its technological dominance over everyone else. Just three in ten, however, believe the United States will be the world’s dominant player in diplomacy, and only slightly more than three in ten believe it will be the world’s dominant economic power.
All of which raises a question: If the United States loses its economic and diplomatic dominance, can its other advantages be maintained? After all, military power depends to a substantial degree on strong alliances and economic and technological prowess, while technological power relies in large part on a country’s capacity to commercialize technological advances.
Two minority groups of respondents have sharply divergent views about American power. The first group, constituting 19 percent of the survey pool, are pessimists, believing one or more of the following will be true by 2033: The United States will be a failed state; it will have broken apart; or it will no longer be the world’s dominant power in any category our survey covered: military, economic, diplomatic, or technological. (Notably, roughly the same proportion of respondents—7 percent—listed the United States and Pakistan as the country most likely to fail over the next ten years.) Fourteen percent of American respondents and 17 percent of European respondents fall into this group. The most striking answers are from those who are citizens of countries outside the United States and Europe: Over half of these are in our pessimists category. (This analysis does not treat them generally as a category because they are too diverse to characterize and too few to rely on statistically.)
The second group, constituting 12 percent of all respondents, are optimists, believing that the United States will be the single dominant power in all fields: military, economic, diplomatic, and technological. Among American and European respondents, the proportions of optimists—12 percent and 15 percent respectively—are roughly the same as those for pessimists. The big difference comes from the rest of the world, where no respondents expect the United States to have such multifaceted hegemony by 2033.
6. Global cooperation on climate is set to increase, but curb the enthusiasm about peak emissions
Climate change is the issue most likely to shoot up the international policy agenda in the coming decade, according to respondents. A plurality (42 percent) believe that it will garner the biggest increase in international collaboration, comfortably ahead of second-place public health (cited by 25 percent of those polled).
Of those who assert that climate issues will attract the biggest boost in global cooperation by 2033, nearly a third (29 percent) believe that, among various social movements presented to respondents, environmental movements will have the most political influence worldwide over the next ten years. Among those who do not think climate change will rise up the international agenda, only 12 percent expect environmental movements to wield such influence.
If political leaders and policymakers focus more on climate issues, will greenhouse-gas emissions peak and start to decline over the next ten years? Views are mixed. The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently estimated that global carbon-dioxide emissions will peak in 2025 (although it also admitted that a significant gap remains between countries’ stated emissions goals and the target of stabilizing the average rise in global temperature at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels). Respondents who foresee greater global cooperation to address climate change are split on peak emissions, in a reminder that such collaboration could result from both a proactive effort to accelerate the clean-energy transition or a more reactive response to a still-rapidly warming world: 47 percent believe that the peak will have occurred by 2033, but 42 percent disagree. Among the others, the equivalent figures—26 percent and 60 percent—reveal much greater pessimism.