2024 global risks start at home

Opinion editor's note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

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Every new year brings new geopolitical risks. This year's are made more precarious by domestic politics in the country often counted on to provide leadership to a turbulent world.

That's the conclusion that can be drawn about America's election year from some influential international experts' list of global concerns. In its annual Preventive Priorities Survey, the august Council on Foreign Relations found for the first time that "the leading concern for foreign policy experts is not a foreign threat to U.S. interests, but the possibility of domestic terrorism and acts of political violence in the United States, particularly around the 2024 presidential election."

In fact, the CFR survey deemed such a scenario to be both "high-likelihood and high-impact" — a characterization shared with the prospects of the Hamas-Israel conflict becoming a regional conflagration as well as an even more serious surge of uncontrolled migration on the southern U.S. border.

For its part, the political-risk consultancy Eurasia Group, in its annual "Top Risks" report, also identified domestic dynamics as its top threat, previewing 2024 as a "geopolitical minefield characterized by three dominant conflicts: Russia vs. Ukraine, Israel vs. Hamas, and the United States vs. itself."

Although America's "military and economy remain exceptionally strong, the U.S. political system is more dysfunctional than any other advanced industrial democracy," stated the Eurasia Group's analysis. "In 2024, the problem will get much worse. The presidential election will deepen the country's political division, testing American democracy to a degree the nation hasn't experienced in 150 years and undermining U.S. credibility internationally."

While the election outcome is uncertain, "the only certainty is damage to America's social fabric, political institutions, and international standing," states the report, which adds: "In a world beset by crises, the prospect of a [former President Donald] Trump victory will weaken America's position on the global stage as Republican lawmakers take up his foreign policy positions and U.S. allies and adversaries hedge against his likely policies."

Expounding on the report to an editorial writer and other journalists, Eurasia Group president and founder Ian Bremmer referenced a "geopolitical recession" the world finds itself in without stout U.S. leadership. "When the most powerful country faces a political crisis that deepens the geopolitical recession, that makes it harder to find leadership that is willing and capable to act as a global policeman, to act as an architect of global trade, to maintain and reform existing international architecture and to promote global values," Bremmer said. "Those things all get worse. The United States is uniquely the one major advanced industrial democracy that cannot presently ensure that they can have a seamless, smooth and peaceful transition of power from one leader to the next."

That analysis is based on fact: Trump tried to reverse his loss in the 2020 election. And so far, he's refused to commit to respecting the results of this November's vote. Indeed, he's imposed a lie that's become a litmus test for fellow Republicans, who may soon officially make him the GOP's presidential candidate after caucuses and primaries commence in Iowa next week.

America's democratic decay makes it even more difficult to push for transcendent objectives, Tom Hanson, diplomat-in-residence at the University of Minnesota Duluth, told an editorial writer. Hanson, a former Foreign Service Officer who will give his annual "U.S. Foreign Policy Update" at a Global Minnesota event on Jan. 31, noted that "President [Joe] Biden has emphasized autocracy vs. democracy as a framing device for the current era, and to have the functioning of our democracy perceived as under duress may detract from the persuasiveness of our arguments."

With the geopolitical outlook compromised by our domestic dynamics, it's more important than ever that state and local leaders as well as institutions and individuals strive to keep the country governable and society from unraveling. Which is why it was so disappointing when Minnesota's Republican congressional caucus went forward with a lockstep endorsement of Trump — the source of so much discord — last week. But it's not too late for other officeholders to hold fast to the truth, and for individual citizens to belie the dark portends in the year's geopolitical outlook. Minnesotans in particular should continue their high level of civic — and civil — engagement.