It’s been more tug-of-war than clean break, but 2021 will mark the year rich countries began extricating themselves from the COVID-19 crisis. With ongoing vaccination challenges in much of the world and the worrying emergence of the Omicron variant, along with supply bottlenecks plus rising inflation and debt, the pandemic continues to exert its relentless push and pull on a beleaguered world. All the while the formidable geopolitical problems that world was wrestling with pre-COVID—from spiraling tensions between the West and China and Russia to the dearth of international action to counteract climate change—haven’t gone away. Just the opposite.

So what will 2022 bring?

Drawing on our many years of experience in forecasting global trends and developments at the US National Intelligence Council, where we were tasked with providing US leaders with long-range analysis and insight, we have identified the top twelve risks and opportunities in 2022 for the world from a US perspective. (Note also what doesn’t appear in these lists; potential crises over Taiwan’s status or North Korea’s nuclear weapons could be catastrophic, but in our judgment these long-simmering issues are unlikely to come to a boil in 2022.) We’ve ordered the scenarios by importance and assigned each a probability; “medium” means a 50/50 chance that the scenario will occur within the next year.

Read the full article at the Atlantic Council.