The Incredible, World-Altering ‘Black Swan’ Events That Could Upend Life in 2025

By Politico featuring Evelyn Farkas, Fletcher alum and Executive Director of the McCain Institute

2024 often felt manic, with assassination attempts on Donald Trump, war in the Middle East and the implosion of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. But there’s no reason to think 2025 will be any calmer.

That’s not just because Trump is likely to preside over a volatile second term in the White House. Based on his first term, that is to be expected. But there will also, undoubtedly, be unexpected shocks that no one can predict in advance.

So we asked an array of thinkers — futurists, scientists, foreign policy analysts and others — to lay out some of the possible “Black Swan” events that could await us in the new year: What are the unpredictable, unlikely episodes that aren’t yet on the radar but would completely upend American life as we know it?

Our experts floated all sorts of catastrophes, from the threat of AI to deadly epidemics, but they also raised the notion of progress, including in some surprising global hotspots.

The following scenarios may or may not take place in 2025, but they shouldn’t immediately be dismissed. When we undertook this exercise last year, a number of predictions proved eerily prescient.

‘The People of Belarus Could See Freedom’

By Evelyn Farkas

The toppling of Aleksandr Lukashenko’s government by the people of Belarus.

The elected president-in-exile, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, likely registering the weakness of the Russian government in light of the defeat of Assad in Syria and economic and manpower pressures weighing on Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, recently urged the people of Belarus to be ready for the moment when they could take to the streets and remove the regime.

It is not too much of a Black Swan to imagine Putin having to compromise and gain Ukrainian land, but witness Ukraine join NATO or come under the bilateral treaty protection of the United States. Or he could still be defeated on the battlefield — especially if Ukraine gets access to the $300 billion in frozen Russian assets.

A negative outcome for the Kremlin in its war of aggression against Ukraine could cause a challenge to Putin’s rule. The people of Belarus could see freedom by taking advantage of Putin’s weakened position and his inability to jump in to save Lukashenko.

Read the full article here.

(This post is republished from Politico.)

(Photo from Chatham House.)