Predicting 2024: Politics and War

The easiest list to write, really.

Middle East:

• The Gaza war sputters on until early in the year an errant 5000lb. bomb slams into a hideously crowded refugee camp in Rafah (on the Egyptian border and supposedly a "safe zone") and kills a thousand people in full view of every news network.
• In the wake of the Rafah bombing, the US attempts to force Israel to withdraw. Israel refuses. Netanyahu claims in a TV address that Israel isn't a US vassal that bows under pressure. He is then almost immediately thrown out of office by a revolt of the ultra-Orthodox parties in the coalition and a good portion of Likud who realize Israel's future without US support is very grim. The governing coalition is replaced through parliamentary maneuvers with a still pretty right-wing but not overtly fascist government under Benny Gantz. No elections are held.
• Hamas remains in control of what is now a devastated wasteland of rubble and rage. The hostages are never found, although a few occasionally show up in videos which may or may not have been taped months before. Israel continues to on an almost weekly basis bomb Gaza in support of raids trying to find any hostages or Hamas leaders; these raids almost always fail. Anyone who can flee Gaza does so in what is effectively very slow de facto ethnic cleansing, because Gaza can no longer sustain life.
• No moves are made towards peace with the Palestinians, and the death toll from the occasional raid into West Bank cities get higher and higher.
• Hezbollah and the Houthis back down from their confrontations after the Netanyahu government falls. Neither group wants to have their country turned into Gaza.
• King Salman dies and Prince Mohammed Bin Salman becomes king of Saudi Arabia. No moves are made towards normalizing relations with Israel, and MBS in general does everything he can (such as manipulating oil prices) to try to get Biden to lose his election. The Line continues to be a massive joke.
• Before the year ends, the Gantz government falls and elections are held which bring fascist Itamar Ben-Gvir to power. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis flee the country.

Europe:

• The war in Ukraine continues on in a stalemate reminiscent of World War One, complete with the rats. F-16s piloted by Ukrainians appear over the skies; Russia shoots down one and crows about it for three months. The F-16s shoot down many more than one Russian plane. Both sides are waiting to see the outcome of the US elections.
• Sometime in the summer elections are held in the UK, which Labor's Keir Starmer wins in a massive landslide. He immediately becomes hated by every progressive online for the same reason he won in a massive landslide: because he isn't Jeremy Corbyn.
• Tesla announces a new factory to be built in northern Italy which does nothing to quell the rumors that Elon Musk and Giorgia Meloni are an item.
• The EU continues to be hamstrung by Hungary's Viktor Orban, who uses the bureaucracy's need for consensus against it like a weapon. However in spite of Orban's opposition, Sweden is finally admitted into NATO, because NATO is more willing to play hardball than the EU (something Erdogan discovered last year).

Asia:

• The DPP wins the Taiwanese elections; China makes harrumphing noises but otherwise does little as they are distracted by Xi Jinping's continuing anti-corruption campaign. (This is primarily to make the PLA combat ready so that it can in fact invade Taiwan, but that doesn't happen next year.)
• North Korea continues to be North Korea, testing ICBMs and other rockets while trying to please Russia by giving it forty-year old munitions that promptly explode when unpacked.
• The South Korean government collapses, again, primarily because President Yoon is so wildly unpopular; some pretext is used to remove him from office (possibly directly to prison) and force early elections.
• Modi wins another term of office in India, although not nearly as overwhelmingly as in previous elections. Government interference in media and other forms of stamping out dissent become increasingly more overt.

Africa:

• continues to exist, though you couldn't tell from most media coverage.
• Wars continue to rage, undocumented and ignored, in Sudan, Ethiopia, the Congo, Nigeria, and most of the Sahel. For good measure Morocco and Algeria probably have a slapfight and Libya explodes again.
• South Africa continues its slow slide into kleptocratic collapse, with water outages joining power outages.
• Everyone who can possibly leave the continent continues to do so.

South America:

• Argentina stumbles into a complete omnishambles as it discovers that electing a president who is literally barking mad may not be the wisest of choices. Its currency collapses, hyperinflation reigns, businesses flee and unemployment skyrockets. At some point Milei replaces the Argentine currency not with the dollar but with bitcoin, which goes about as well as you'd expect.
• Venezuela tries to invade Guyana and fails completely. The US stands ready to assist Guyanese defenses, but most Venezuelan troops promptly get lost in the Amazonian jungle and wander aimlessly.

North America:

• To everyone's sorrow, the US presidential election is once again between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. In desperation at finding anything or anyone else to vote for, each third party candidate get occasional media-driven popularity bumps before saying something that torpedoes their candidacy completely (Robert Kennedy insists that spinach gives you mumps, Cornel West defends Elon Musk's oversight of Twitter).
• Trump is convicted in his federal sedition trial before the Republican convention. He's nominated anyway.
• Joe Biden is a walking panic attack on the campaign trail, and by Oct0ber is barely able to put together a coherent sentence during a speech. To be fair, Donald Trump hasn't been able to put together a coherent sentence since 2015, but life isn't fair. The debates are a comedy of errors with both men screaming at each other unintelligibly.
• Biden manages to win the election, by the narrowest of margins possible (a few hundred votes separating the candidates in several states). Trump announces, loudly and frequently, that he does not accept the results and in fact is now President, which no one tells him is not actually a thing you can do, legally. As Biden takes the oath in January, Trump's followers begin to plan violent insurrection in response, instigated by their leader's now completely insane social media postings.

Everywhere:

• The weather continues to be a freak show of once-in-a-lifetime disasters. Someone might want to look into that.

Tomorrow: Predicting 2024, Technology Edition. Elon Musk may be involved.