Tag: Atlantic Council

About the paper

The report is a mixed-methods strategic foresight publication from the Atlantic Council that combines original survey research, expert commentary, six “snow leopard” horizon-scanning essays, and a shorter AI discussion section.

Its core empirical base is the organisation’s fourth annual survey of 447 geostrategists and foresight practitioners from 72 countries, fielded in November and December 2025; the respondent pool is global, though roughly half are US citizens and the sample is drawn from the Atlantic Council’s network rather than a general population sample.

Length: 76 pages

More information / download:
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/atlantic-council-strategy-paper-series/global-foresight-2036/

Core Insights

1. What is the report’s central argument about the world of 2036?

The report’s central argument is that the decade ahead is likely to be more unstable, more fragmented, and more dangerous than the present, even though the exact future cannot be predicted with certainty. Rather than offering a single forecast, the report uses foresight to map the pressures, risks, and directional shifts that experts think are most likely to shape 2036.

Its overall tone is notably pessimistic. The opening findings state that 63 percent of respondents expect the world in 2036 to be worse off than it is now, while only 37 percent think it will be better. The report frames this darker mood through a cluster of reinforcing trends:

• intensifying US-China rivalry
• a possible hot conflict over Taiwan
• weakening multilateral institutions
• democratic decline
• nuclear proliferation
• climate stress
• and rapid AI advances whose benefits are matched by growing concern.

At the same time, the report is not purely apocalyptic. It argues that foresight is valuable precisely because it helps policymakers and readers prepare for multiple possible futures, including surprising ones. That is why the publication pairs survey findings with under-the-radar “snow leopards” and a separate AI section: the aim is not just to describe probable big trends, but to widen the reader’s field of vision.

2. What are the report’s main findings from the expert survey?

The report organises its main survey results into ten headline findings. The most prominent is that respondents broadly expect China to surpass the United States economically by 2036, even if they do not think China will simply replace the US as an uncontested global hegemon. Instead, most foresee either bipolar competition or a more diffuse multipolar system. They also increasingly expect China to attempt to take Taiwan by force, and more than 40 percent foresee another world war, most likely sparked in Taiwan or surrounding waters.

A second major finding is that NATO is expected to survive, but not unchanged. Respondents are divided on whether it will become more or less influential, yet 44 percent think it will no longer exist in its current form by 2036. The survey also suggests growing doubts about whether the United States will still play the same commanding role within the alliance.

On Russia and Ukraine, the survey points away from a decisive Russian victory and toward a frozen conflict. Respondents also see Russia as a diminished power by 2036, though still potentially dangerous, especially in nuclear terms. On AI, a majority believe artificial general intelligence could emerge within the decade, and more respondents still see AI as a net positive than a net negative, though the gap has narrowed as concern rises.

Other major findings include:

• expectations of wider nuclear proliferation, especially involving Iran and possibly Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Japan, and some NATO countries
• a more autonomous but still strategically limited Europe
• declining climate cooperation even as warming worsens
• weakening global institutions alongside democratic erosion
• and continued dollar dominance, though with crypto seen as the biggest challenger rather than another national currency.

3. What evidence and patterns in the report best reveal how experts think power is shifting?

One of the clearest patterns is that respondents do not think the future belongs to a single dominant actor in the way the post-Cold War era was often understood. The report repeatedly points to diffusion, contestation, and erosion of established forms of leadership. China is seen as rising strongly in economic power, nearly matching the US in technology and diplomacy, while the United States is still expected to remain militarily pre-eminent. That split itself is telling: respondents appear to be imagining a world where different forms of power are no longer concentrated in one state.

Another pattern is institutional weakening.

Respondents expect the United Nations, UN Security Council, WTO, World Bank, and IMF all to lose influence over the next decade.

That suggests not merely dissatisfaction with current institutions, but a broader expectation that the post-1945 order is fraying. The report explicitly connects this decay with democratic recession, arguing that respondents who foresee deeper democratic decline are especially likely to expect institutional weakening and a worse overall world.

A third pattern concerns regional and bloc-level reconfiguration. Europe is not expected to become the world’s leading military, economic, or tech power, yet respondents increasingly think it will achieve greater strategic autonomy. NATO may endure, but in altered form. The Global South section then adds another layer by showing that respondents from those countries often expect even sharper shifts away from US primacy and are more inclined to see China rising, Russia doing better in Ukraine, and even internal US breakdown.

Together, these patterns show that the report is less about simple replacement of one superpower by another and more about a messy redistribution of influence across states, blocs, technologies, markets, and non-state actors.

4. What does the report suggest about the role of technology and underappreciated trends in shaping the future?

The report treats technology as both a direct force of change and a lens that reshapes how other global risks unfold. AI is the most obvious example. Respondents expect major advances, including the possible arrival of AGI within a decade, and the report presents AI as a technology with systemic implications for economics, geopolitics, knowledge production, and everyday life. But the accompanying expert discussion is more cautious than the survey toplines: Atlantic Council specialists stress that today’s AI is not good at truly forecasting the future, that AGI is far from certain, and that trust, energy demands, and market instability could constrain progress.

The six “snow leopards” deepen this technological and horizon-scanning emphasis. These essays focus on phenomena that may be easy to overlook now but could become highly consequential. They include:

1. Private tech firms shaping conflict outcomes
2. Circular rather than one-way migration
3. Kelp forests as climate and economic assets
4. The erosion of the human rights order
5. AI-driven cultural erasure
6. Neurotechnology capable of decoding thought.

What unites these cases is the report’s belief that future disruption will not come only from the usual headline issues. Some of the biggest shifts may emerge from domains that sit between established categories: companies behaving like geopolitical actors, migration functioning as an innovation loop, environmental restoration becoming industrial strategy, or data bias turning into cultural loss. This part of the report broadens the frame beyond interstate competition and argues for paying attention to early signals and second-order effects.

5. What are the report’s biggest implications for policymakers, strategists, and communicators?

The report’s main implication is that leaders should prepare for a world defined less by stability and rule-bound cooperation than by rivalry, fragmentation, and institutional stress. For policymakers, this means planning for deterrence, alliance adaptation, nuclear risk, democratic erosion, and climate-related conflict at the same time rather than treating them as separate silos. The report’s structure itself makes that point: geopolitics, democracy, climate, finance, and technology are deeply entangled.

A second implication is that strategic assumptions inherited from the post-Cold War period look increasingly fragile. The report suggests that US leadership can no longer be taken for granted, NATO may need redesign rather than maintenance alone, and multilateral bodies may not be capable of managing future crises in the way they were once expected to. That pushes strategists toward resilience, contingency planning, and coalition-building under less favourable conditions.

For communicators, the report is especially useful as a map of narratives that may dominate the coming decade:

• democratic decline
• technological disruption
• geopolitical fragmentation
• and competing visions of order.

It also shows that audiences are unlikely to share a single worldview.

The section on Global South respondents is particularly important here, because it demonstrates that expectations about the future vary significantly by geography and political vantage point. In practical terms, this means communication about global risk, strategy, or public policy will increasingly need to account for fragmented perceptions rather than assuming one shared interpretive frame.

The final implication is methodological: the report argues implicitly for foresight as a discipline of disciplined imagination rather than prediction. Its value lies not in claiming certainty, but in helping readers test assumptions, notice emerging signals, and think more seriously about consequences before they fully arrive.

About the paper

The report is a mixed-methods foresight study on what the world may look like in 2035, combining an expert survey, short horizon-scanning essays on six under-the-radar “snow leopards,” and three written future scenarios.

The original research element is a survey of 357 geostrategists and foresight practitioners drawn from the Atlantic Council’s networks, fielded in late November and early December 2024, with respondents spread across sixty countries plus the United States and representing every continent except Antarctica; the survey sample, however, skewed US-based, male, and older.

Length: 84 pages

More information / download:
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/atlantic-council-strategy-paper-series/global-foresight-2025/

Core Insights

1. What overall picture of the world in 2035 does the report present?

The report presents a distinctly darker-than-light global outlook. Its central message is that many leading strategists expect the next decade to be shaped less by steady progress than by heightened instability, strategic rivalry, institutional weakness, and accumulating systemic risks. The report explicitly says that 62 percent of respondents think the world in ten years will be worse off than today, while only 38 percent think it will be better off.

That pessimism is not absolute. The report notes some areas of guarded optimism, especially around artificial intelligence and climate cooperation. A majority of respondents think AI will have a net positive impact on global affairs over the next decade, and about half foresee expanded cooperation on climate change. But those brighter notes are outweighed by broader anxiety about war, nuclear risk, democratic decline, and geopolitical fragmentation.

Structurally, the report is trying to do more than predict single outcomes. It says foresight cannot provide certainty, but it can help readers understand the forces already driving change and the possible consequences of those forces over the coming decade and beyond. That framing matters: this is not a forecast claiming “this will happen,” but an effort to map where expert opinion sees the heaviest risks and most consequential uncertainties.

So the overall picture is of a world entering 2035 under pressure from several overlapping dynamics at once:

• hard-power rivalry
• erosion of the postwar order
• weak prospects for conflict resolution
• technological disruption
• and climate-linked stress.

The report’s worldview is therefore not just pessimistic but systemic: it suggests that multiple domains of instability are reinforcing each other.

2. Which geopolitical and security risks do surveyed experts see as most likely to shape the next decade?

The headline risk is major war. The report’s most striking finding is that 40 percent of respondents expect another world war by 2035, defined as a multifront conflict among great powers. It adds that this war could go nuclear and could extend into space, with 48 percent expecting nuclear weapons to be used by at least one actor in the coming decade and 45 percent expecting direct military conflict in space.

The report identifies China and Russia as the main vectors through which a broader conflict could emerge. On China, 65 percent of respondents think Beijing will try to retake Taiwan by force within the next decade, a sharp rise from the previous year’s survey. On Russia, 45 percent think Russia and NATO will engage in direct military conflict, also a significant increase year-on-year. In other words, the report suggests that expert concern is moving away from abstract rivalry and toward concrete expectations of military confrontation.

Another major concern is bloc formation. Just under half of respondents expect China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea to become formal allies by 2035, and many foresee a world divided into China-aligned and US-aligned blocs. The report treats this as a potentially war-amplifying trend rather than merely a diplomatic realignment. Respondents who foresaw both bloc division and formal alliance-building were much more likely also to expect world war.

Nuclear proliferation is another core risk. The report says 88 percent of respondents expect at least one new country to obtain nuclear weapons in the next decade. Iran is by far the most cited likely new nuclear power, but expectations also rose for South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Japan. On use, Russia and North Korea are seen as the most likely current nuclear powers to launch a nuclear strike.

The report also shows pessimism about existing conflicts. On Ukraine, only 4 percent think the war will end on terms largely favourable to Ukraine; most expect either terms favourable to Russia or a frozen conflict. On the Middle East, respondents are much more optimistic about Israeli-Saudi normalisation than about Israeli-Palestinian peace. More than 60 percent expect the current status quo of occupied Palestinian territories to persist by 2035.

Taken together, these findings suggest the report sees the coming decade as one in which escalation risks are rising across several theatres at once, while the mechanisms for resolving those conflicts appear weak.

3. How does the report assess the future of US power, alliances, multilateral institutions, and democracy?

The report’s view of the United States is nuanced: it still sees the US as the likeliest dominant military power in 2035, but a weaker and more uncertain leader in other domains. Seventy-one percent of respondents expect the US to remain militarily dominant, and 58 percent still see it as the leading technological innovator. But fewer expect it to dominate economically, diplomatically, or in soft power, and confidence has dropped across several of these measures compared with the previous year.

That matters because the report implies that US power is increasingly relative rather than comprehensive. It is not presenting a picture of outright American collapse, but of a more limited United States operating in a multipolar world. Three-quarters of respondents expect the world in 2035 to be multipolar, with multiple centres of power.

Alliances remain part of that picture, but with more uncertainty than before. A majority still expect the US to maintain its alliance network in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, yet this figure fell sharply from the previous survey. At the same time, almost half expect Europe to achieve greater “strategic autonomy” by taking more responsibility for its own security. So the report suggests a future in which alliances may persist, but under new terms and with more burden-sharing or hedging.

On multilateral institutions, the mood is much grimmer. Large majorities expect the United Nations, the UN Security Council, and the World Trade Organization to be less capable of solving problems by 2035 than they are today. The World Bank and IMF fare somewhat better, while respondents are relatively more hopeful about regional groupings such as ASEAN, the EU, and even BRICS. That pattern reveals an important assumption in the report: global governance is likely to weaken, while regional or alternative formations may gain relative importance.

The report is similarly downbeat on democracy. Nearly half of respondents think today’s democratic recession will worsen into a democratic depression by 2035, while only 17 percent foresee a democratic renaissance. It also says 65 percent expect global press freedom to decrease. So the report does not treat democratic backsliding as a side issue; it sees it as one of the defining trends of the next decade.

There is also a gender dimension to that pessimism. Women in the survey were more negative than men across several questions, especially about nuclear use, democratic decline, rights curtailment, and future US dominance. The report interprets this as reflecting persistent inequalities and the unequal burden crises place on women.

4. What overlooked “snow leopards” does the report argue could have outsized future impact?

One of the report’s most distinctive features is its “snow leopards” section: six under-the-radar developments that may not dominate headlines now but could become highly consequential. This is the horizon-scanning part of the report, and it broadens the analysis beyond headline geopolitics.

1.The first is the threat that non-state actors could attack undersea cables.

The report argues that the global digital and financial system depends heavily on these cables and that they are vulnerable not only to states but also to militant groups or terrorists. Its core point is that a relatively low-cost attack on critical subsea infrastructure could produce outsized disruption across communications, finance, and military operations.

2. The second is enhanced geothermal systems.

The report presents this as a low-carbon energy source with major underexploited potential, noting that if technological and cost barriers fall, it could become a significant contributor to electricity generation in the United States. This is framed not merely as a climate story but as a strategic energy-development story.

3. The third is a new carbon-capture material, COF-999, described as a yellow powder that could dramatically reduce the cost and resource intensity of pulling carbon dioxide from the air.

The report does not claim this solves climate change, but it treats the discovery as an example of the sort of scientific breakthrough that could shift the economics of mitigation.

4. The fourth is rewilding.

Here the report argues that land abandonment, urbanisation, changing food systems, and ecological restoration could together make much more land available for rewilding, with implications for biodiversity, carbon capture, tourism, and land use. It also notes trade-offs and possible backlash, so this is presented as a consequential but contested trend.

5. The fifth is quantum batteries.

The report uses this as an example of a frontier technology that may transform energy storage, with particular attention to medical devices, emergency systems, and electric mobility. The point is not that the technology is ready now, but that its eventual impact could be large if the science translates into scalable applications.

6. The sixth is Gen Z’s vulnerability to misinformation.

This may be the most sociologically revealing of the snow leopards. The report challenges the assumption that digital natives are naturally better at navigating false information, arguing instead that heavy social media exposure, algorithmic feeds, parasocial influence, and weak verification habits may leave this generation especially susceptible. The long-term implication is that future elites may enter positions of power with distorted information habits and weaker trust.

Across all six, the deeper message is that the future will not be shaped only by visible great-power rivalry. It may also be shaped by overlooked vulnerabilities, scientific breakthroughs, and social shifts that sit below the surface until they suddenly matter.

5. What do the report’s three scenarios suggest about the range of possible global futures—and what is the report ultimately trying to make readers understand?

The report ends with three scenarios for 2035:

1. “The reluctant international order”
2. “China ascendant”
3. and “Climate of fear.”

These are explicitly presented not as predictions but as plausible futures designed to stimulate thinking. That distinction is crucial. The scenarios are a tool for exploring interaction effects between present-day trends, not for declaring which future is most likely.

“The reluctant international order” imagines a world in which the rules-based international order has neither collapsed nor been revitalised. Cooperation persists because major powers and non-state actors still need it, even if they engage reluctantly and pragmatically. This scenario suggests that messy, improvised, partial cooperation may be more realistic than either liberal renewal or total breakdown.

“China ascendant” imagines a world in which Beijing becomes the dominant global power, not through one dramatic rupture but through a slow shift enabled by US inwardness, economic influence, institutional repositioning, and strategic patience. The point here is that geopolitical transformation need not come through open war; it can happen gradually through hedging, institutional drift, and changing perceptions of who is reliable and effective.

“Climate of fear” imagines a world where worsening climate instability drives migration, political conflict, democratic stress, and escalating interest in radical responses such as geoengineering. This scenario shows the report’s assumption that climate change is not just an environmental issue but a force multiplier affecting politics, conflict, mobility, governance, and public fear.

Taken together, the three scenarios reveal the report’s deeper purpose. It is not merely asking, “What will happen?” It is asking readers to think about how today’s choices, vulnerabilities, and neglected signals can combine into very different but still plausible futures. That is why the report mixes survey data, horizon scanning, and narrative scenarios. It wants to move the reader from passive consumption of trends to active strategic imagination.

The underlying perspective is clear: the future is not predetermined, but it is being shaped now by decisions on deterrence, alliance maintenance, institutional reform, climate action, technology governance, and democratic resilience. The report’s central implication is therefore strategic rather than descriptive: if leaders fail to act early on compounding risks, the darker futures it sketches become more plausible.