Welcome to the Age of Chaos

The world remains in a protracted interregnum, still unsettled, fragmenting, but no less contested. The National Security Strategy makes the U.S. retreat from primacy official: “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” The old neoliberal rules-based architecture is decomposing, power diffusing, and much of the world is searching for new multilateral arrangements to act as a buffer against three predatory, revisionist major powers.

Every year since 2017, we have given our predictions for the greatest threats facing the world. If some of the top risks this year seem to echo those we anticipated for 2025, it is not that they are static, but that the peril continues, without reaching a denouement. The risks of a Trump presidency we feared have come faster and thicker than we envisioned of Gaza, Ukraine, and climate. China and Taiwan are not among the top geopolitical risks, as we judge 2026 is unlikely to see tensions rise to that level in the aftermath of the summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Every year since 2017, we have given our predictions for the greatest threats facing the world. If some of the top risks this year seem to echo those we anticipated for 2025, it is not that they are static, but that the peril continues, without reaching a denouement. The risks of a Trump presidency we feared have come faster and thicker than we envisioned of Gaza, Ukraine, and climate. China and Taiwan are not among the top geopolitical risks, as we judge 2026 is unlikely to see tensions rise to that level in the aftermath of the summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The world remains in a protracted interregnum, still unsettled, fragmenting, but no less contested. The National Security Strategy makes the U.S. retreat from primacy official: “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” The old neoliberal rules-based architecture is decomposing, power diffusing, and much of the world is searching for new multilateral arrangements to act as a buffer against three predatory, revisionist major powers.

Their efforts raise the question of whether it is possible to have a stable multilateral system without a hegemon. The world is approaching an inflection point, where discontinuity—war, financial crisis, or natural disaster—buries the post-Cold War era and ushers in a new, unknowable order.

With three years yet in his term, Trump is already the most consequential and transformative president since FDR, what some would call a world-historical figure—one who alters the course of history, and likely not for the better. The United States appears to many a predatory rogue actor, a major destabilizing force with Trump diminishing the value of alliances and multilateralism that have been the hallmarks of U.S. foreign policy since 1945.

The militarization of U.S. cities; dissolution of U.S. soft power (e.g., the U.S. Agency for International Development, Voice of America); the slashing of research and development budgets, the secret sauce of U.S. innovation; and abandonment of U.S.-led multilateral institutions (of late, the COP30 climate summit and G-20) and reordering of global trade have fostered worries of a rogue America out to destroy itself and the system it created. Trends are not pointing toward others picking up the pieces, able to renew a rules-based liberal, multilateralist order.

This ninth edition of our annual foresight exercise, “Top 10 Global Risks,” is drawn from our forecasting experience at the National Intelligence Council. In the language of intelligence, we have medium to high confidence in all the probabilities we have assigned to each of the risks, given the “credible” to “high-quality” level of information that is available. As it is for intelligence estimates a “high or medium confidence” judgment still carries the possibility of it being wrong.

1. Trump’s Economic Morass

A banner displayed by the organization MoveOn to protest against Trump’s tariffs on imports in Los Angeles, California.

Many economists have already sounded the alarm that all the preconditions are present for economic meltdown. Financial assets are massively overvalued with unbounded artificial intelligence fueling 40 percent of U.S. GDP growth and 80 percent of stock market growth even though productivity gains by companies experimenting with AI are so far elusive.

Some experts are beginning to doubt whether AI can really go beyond machine learning to the artificial general intelligence of Silicon Valley dreams, charging that current AI models can handle simple problems but “fundamentally