The month of January has rolled around again, as usual all too soon. And, just like as I have done in Januaries past (see 2021, 2022, and 2023) I am going to review the predictions that I made for the last year’s political events, note where I got right and where I was wrong, and make a new set for the coming year.
Last year’s post ended with a summary of the predictions, which was as follows: “I expect that in 2023, commodity inflation will exceed 11 percent, the Ukraine War will either become a frozen conflict or else develop in a way favorable to Russia, Joe Biden will not be impeached, and Donald Trump will trail the combined polling average of his top two Republican rivals at the year’s end. The great powers will avoid wars with one another, and they will also avoid regime change, with the possible exception of Russia. Dedollarization and infrastructure decay will continue, but at too gradual of a pace for most Americans to notice their effects, and the Chinese economy will remain weak.”
Out of eight predictions, I called six of them right and two wrong. I muffed the inflation prediction, and seriously underestimated Donald Trump’s staying power in Republican politics. However, I was right about the Ukraine War going in Russia’s favour, Biden not being impeached, and the lack of direct wars between the Great Powers. Also, the Great Powers avoided regime changes, though Russia came very close with the Wagner Mutiny, a topic on which I have already written. (Yevgeny Prigozhin’s “reward” for calling off the coup at the last moment was getting his private jet blown up in a mafia-style assassination two months later. If you strike at the king, strike to kill.)
My prediction that China’s economy would struggle to recover from the Covid shutdowns was also borne out. While state media published rosy growth numbers as usual, Chinese exports are down about 5 percent, and a lot of other fundamentals are bad as well. (Here is an article explaining why the real growth number should be about 1.5 percent).
An eventual downturn of this sort was inevitable, even before Covid hit. After all, even if the people in Wuhan had had the good sense to say no when NIAID offered them reams of American money to do bat research that was too dangerous for the Americans to do at home, China would still be dealing with a demographic situation where 50-year-olds outnumber 20-year-olds three to two, and that sort of thing pretty-much spells the end for an era of economic vibrancy.
Finally, back here in America, dedollarization and infrastructure decay are still too slow to make the national news, but when you look closely, it’s hard to avoid admitting that the US economy is running on fumes. (Here is a good article explaining why, even though both federal and local governments spend vast sums on infrastructure, little has actually been built since the 1970s.)
How, then, did I make my two mistakes? Inflation was the simpler one – since commodity inflation has averaged about 5 percent since 2000, I always start each year with a prediction that inflation will be high, with a caveat that I expect to be wrong about this a quarter of the time. Since I measure inflation by looking at commodity prices directly, instead of CBI cost-of-living numbers (the latter are easy to gimmick) I end up with inflation figures which roughly track the real decline of American purchasing power, but which are also much more uneven than the official numbers. (For instance, I measured +25 percent inflation in 2020, +24 percent in 2021, -11 percent in 2022, and -9 percent in 2023). The table below shows the prices that I used to get my figures.
Well, notwithstanding what happened in the last two years (when, by my own measurement, the value of the dollar grew with respect to commodity prices) I am going to once more predict high inflation. I just don’t see much room for this brief deflationary trend to continue, so I am predicting an 80 percent chance that commodity inflation for 2024 will clock in at 15 percent or higher.
Finally, there is the matter of Donald Trump. When I wrote last year’s predictions, the GOP had just had a bum year in the 2022 midterms, so I anticipated that the Republican base was losing its enthusiasm for Trump. I was stunningly wrong.
On December 31, 2023, in the RealClearPolitics polling average, Donald Trump was leading with 62.5 percent, while Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley were tied at 11.2 percent each. Rather than trailing the combined average of his top two rivals, as I thought he would, Trump led their combined score by a whopping 40.1 percentage points.
The plain fact is that most Republicans, despite being too ignorant and/or cynical to follow the intellectual arguments put forth by Trump’s rivals about why Trump is an ineffective statesman, still realize deep down that Trump respects them in a way that most Republican politicians don’t. (I say ‘realize’ because I think they’re correct, as I’ve explained at length here.)
The GOP’s poor performance in 2022 was probably a combination of (1) Democratic backlash against Dobbs v. Jackson (usually, the party in the White House gets complacent, but losing such a big SCOTUS case four months before the election stopped that from happening) and (2) Poor turnout of Trump voters when the one man who makes politics interesting wasn’t on the ballot.
Issue 1 will have attenuated somewhat by November of this year, and number 2 won’t matter at all, so I actually think Trump’s chances of winning the White House back are pretty good. He’s leading by about 1 point in the RCP polling average, which is very good news (Trump trailed in both 2016 and 2020, and overperformed the polls both times). Trump’s legal troubles won’t be much of an obstacle, mainly because (1) Republicans on SCOTUS won’t yield to the Democrats’ demand that he be removed from the ballot for crimes for which he has yet to be tried, and (2) his trials will be delayed until after the election, due to lengthy jabberwinding about presidential immunity, the ownership of presidential documents, and other constitutional questions for which there is little or no existing case law.
The Iowa caucuses earlier this week saw Trump winning 51.0 percent of the vote, next to 21.2 percent for DeSantis and 19.1 percent for Haley. Pundits are of course trying to spin this in every direction imaginable – Trump won by 30 points, therefore he is invincible! Trump’s opponents got almost half the vote, therefore if they unite behind one leader they might beat Trump! Turnout was low, therefore Republicans lack enthusiasm and will probably lose in November! No, the Republicans will do fine! Turnout was low because Iowa was having a huge blizzard and everyone already knew Trump would win, so a lot of people decided to just stay home and watch the Buccaneers demolish the Eagles! And so forth.
My own predictions are as follows: Trump and Biden will both be their respective parties’ nominees, provided that they are still alive in November. Trump is more likely to win (I give him three-to-two odds); he’s doing better in the polls right now and Biden’s approval numbers are terrible, but Trump still has a big weakness in that his speeches are sounding increasingly senile and unhinged, and seeing too much of him on television might warm some voters up to Biden.
I expect the Republicans to gain at least one Senate seat (this year’s map is terrible for the Dems; they will almost certainly lose West Virginia due to Joe Manchin’s retirement, and Republicans are only defending 11 seats, none of which are in states that voted for Biden in 2020). The House of Representatives will probably go to whichever party wins the presidency.
In foreign affairs, I expect that 2024 will be a worse year for Ukraine than 2023 was. In 2023, despite the huge resources which Ukraine poured into its celebrated counteroffensive, there were only miniscule changes (most of them Russian advances) in the front line. Meanwhile Ukraine lost about 130,000 soldiers killed to Russia’s 200,000. But since Russia has about four times more people than Ukraine, Russia can keep this up much longer than Ukraine can. Therefore, notwithstanding the superior bravery and generalship that Ukraine has shown so far, I expect Ukraine’s resistance to eventually crumple in the face of a stubborn, numerous, and better-armed adversary – this is what I warned about fourteen months ago when I said that if Ukraine didn’t offer reasonable peace terms sooner rather than later, it would end up in much the same situation as the Confederate States of America in 1864-65.
The Russia-Ukraine war is the first time since World War II and its aftershocks that two upper-tier national governments have fought a lengthy land conflict. Prior to February of 2022, hardly anyone knew what modern war looked like; now, we have some ideas. To begin with, vast improvements in the accuracy of nearly all weapons have tilted the balance of war toward the defenders. Trench warfare a la World War I is back in; laser-guided artillery paired with quadcopter spotters, plus cheap suicide drones that can carry warheads straight to the most vulnerable parts of tanks, have made 1939-40 style Blitzkrieg unfeasible.
At first this was bad for Russia, since Russia’s original plan seemed to be to thunder over the border and occupy Ukraine’s capital and perhaps most of its land within a few weeks. When this failed, as much due to bad logistics on Russia’s part as to the unexpected bravery of the Ukrainians, the Russians retreated from their overextended position, after which soldiers on both sides dug in and the front stagnated.
It won’t stay stagnant forever; both sides have kept on losing men at a rapid pace all throughout the war’s 23 months, and Ukraine has fewer men to lose. As of two months ago, the average age of a Ukrainian soldier is 43 – hardly a sign that the war is sustainable. Ukraine having to “scale back military operations” in the last few months, due to waning supplies of foreign munitions, also bodes poorly for the future.
My prediction is that 2024 will be much worse for Ukraine than 2023 was.
I expect that the United States, Britain, France, Israel, Russia, China, India, and Iran will continue to avoid going to war with each other. Unlike in the run-ups to World Wars I and II, where the Great Powers were packed check to jowl and it was easy for a regional conflict to ignite into something bigger, nowadays all of the Great Powers are separated from each other by oceans, by buffer states, or by natural obstacles like the Himalayas. This, plus the existence of nuclear weapons, means that it’s much more practical for them to engage in proxy wars than take on the huge risks of a direct attack.
Therefore, I don’t expect the present flareup in the Israel-Hamas war to spread into the wider Middle-East. While Iranian proxies like the Houthis can be expected to keep making light and noise, their sponsors in Tehran know deep down that their own interests are not served by getting into an existential war with Israel. Likewise, while China will keep up its sabre-rattling over Taiwan, I expect that the CCP has already concluded that it is more practical to conquer Taiwan via a blockade than a sudden invasion, and that a blockade will be easier to pull off near the end of President Xi’s time in office (whenever that may be) than now, when China’s navy is only in the middle of the rapid buildup which Xi has ordered.
Thus, my prediction this year of peace between the Great Powers is the same as ever. (Sorry doomers; if you end up needing your iodine pills, it’s more likely to be because of too much DEI hiring at a nearby nuclear power plant than because of a war with Russia or China). Likewise, I expect that the governments of the Great Powers will remain stable – Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, Emmanuel Macron, and Ayatollah Khamenei will all be in office at the year’s end, provided none of them die of old age first. Parliamentary politics being what it is, Rishi Sunak and Benjamin Netanyahu are both at risk of being ousted more suddenly, though neither has need to worry about an actual coup.
As one of my few optimistic predictions, I expect that solar power generation will have another record year, both in the United States and globally. It seems that, after decades of photovoltaic panels being an uneconomical boondoggle except in niche applications like spacecraft, the technology has finally picked up enough gradual improvements to start competing against coal, gas, and nuclear power, at least in places with sunny climates.
If even Texas, with its pragmatic, business-friendly leadership that cares little for green energy per se, was able to see an eightfold jump in solar power generation between 2019 and 2023, then things are definitely on the upswing. So I feel pretty certain that, over the coming year, solar power in the United States will grow from its present 3.4 percent of the total electricity mix to 4.0 percent or higher.
In conclusion, I expect that 2024 will see an end to the recent inflation lull, with commodity prices growing by at least 15 percent. In the Russia-Ukraine War, 2024 will be worse (for Ukraine) than 2023, with a serious chance of the collapse of the Ukrainian front, followed by major territorial losses. Nonetheless, the Great Powers – the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, India, Iran, and Israel – will avoid direct conflicts with each other, and will also avoid regime change. The Israel-Hamas war will not expand into other countries, and China will not attack Taiwan. Solar electricity will continue its rapid growth both in the United States and globally. Donald Trump and Joe Biden will both win their parties’ presidential nominations. Republicans will gain at least one Senate seat, Trump has a three-to-two chance of winning the general election, and the House of Representatives will go to whichever party wins the White House.
If you’re a typical American, your life won’t change much as a result of any of this. What changes you do see will have to be of your own making. The things that are of the most use in the uncertain times ahead – things like learning to grow your own food, joining a fraternal order, developing multiple income sources, honing your firearm skills, and making sure that your children, if you have any, are getting a wholesome education – are not politically flashy. But when the bottom finally falls out of the present geopolitical order (and it’s been my constant claim, here at Twilight Patriot, that this will happen sometime in the next decade or two) it will be those kinds of things that will determine whether you and your family are around to rebuild.
Very interesting, as usual. I dearly hope that the 'no war among the great powers' prediction comes true. However, it's worth reading this review of a book by Mr Netanyahu, which shows that the present Israeli government is not like the other nuclear powers: https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-churchill-of-the-middle-east/ ... The key determinant will be, in my opinion, their assessment of how far along Iran is in its drive to acquire deliverable nuclear weapons. The Israelis will not permit this, and there are no limits to what they will do to stop it. Therefore, get those iodine pills.