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Notes -
In what’s becoming an annual ritual, I’m putting together a list of predictions for the year to come to share with some like-minded friends, mostly for fun and discussion. They’re still a work-in-progress, mostly cobbled together yesterday on the toilet, so I’m keen to tweak them. Format is straightforward.
<5% chances
Four things that you are extremely confident will not happen, the less obvious the better (no points for “the sun goes supernova”). To get top score, none of these should happen.
(1) Chinese invasion or full-scale blockade of Taiwan.
(2) Domestic terror attack in Western country killing >500 people
(3) Major housing price collapse (>25% YOY fall) in any G7 economy
(4) Nuclear weapons used outside Ukraine
~25% chances
Four things that you think are fairly unlikely to happen in 2023. For perfect calibration, exactly one of these should happen.
(5) At least one nuclear weapon used in Ukraine.
(6) Trump declares he will not/cannot run in the 2024 election.
(7) New serious COVID variant triggers new serious round of pandemic (more than 30 days of national lockdowns in UK)
(8) Average OPEC oil price for 2023 >$110
50% chances
Here I’m shooting for 2/4 to come true.
(9) BTC price recovers to at least $25k within first six months of 2023.
(10) Twitter announces bankruptcy.
(11) Western-made jets supplied to Ukraine
(12) Erdogan to win June 2023 Turkish national elections
75% chances
Shooting for 3/4.
(13) No new UK General Election.
(14) Vladimir Putin still President of Russia.
(15) A free Open Source LLM available by December 2023 with equivalent functionality to ChatGPT and no hard content restrictions.
(16) UK economy experiences net negative growth in 2023
>95% chances
Shooting for 4/4 here, but again, less credit for extremely obvious stuff.
(17) Joe Biden still President of USA at end of 2023
(18) SCOTUS overturns Regents of the University of California v. Bakke
(19) Xi Jinping remains Chairman of Communist Party
(20) SpaceX has first successful orbital flight of Starship.
Would love to hear your thoughts!
Yeah, I am dead sure this won't happen.
The others look reasonable to me.
I'm glad someone picked up on this. 25% is perhaps a little exaggerated (20% seems closer to the mark), but this an area where I'm far more pessimistic than most of the general public. However, among the nuclear policy scholars and geopolitics wonks in my circle, the mood is pretty bleak.
A few of my reasons for pessimism:
Russia is currently losing the war. It has failed to make any significant gains since Severodonetsk and Lysychansk in the summer, and those came at huge costs in terms of expended artillery shells. It has suffered major setbacks in Kharkiv and Kherson, its offensive in Bakhmut has been a bloody disaster, and it's now under pressure again in Northern Luhansk. Mobilisation has stemmed the bleeding but looks unlikely to change the course of the war. Meanwhile, Western military supplies continue apace, and Ukraine shows no sign of capitulating through loss of political will.
Russia has burnt many of its boats and committed itself to fairly maximalist war aims. By formally annexing Donetsk and Luhansk and even more so by annexing Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, it's made it constitutionally very difficult to accept any kind of compromise peace. Through its partial mobilisation and high casualties, it's made it more difficult to justify a loss to its citizenry. And its new economic situation is not one it can easily walk back from; Europe is now investing billions in new LNG infrastructure and signing deals with Qatar and the UAE, foreign companies will take decades to regain investment confidence in Russia, and many of the talented Russians now in Turkey, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and Serbia will never return. The consequence of this is that Russia has little to gain (at least in the short-/medium-term) from reconciliation with the West; and equally, Russia has little to lose from further antagonizing the West.
The upshot of all of this is that if a Russian loss looks imminent, and it can be averted by using nuclear weapons, then Russian may well decide to do so; "might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb", as the saying goes.
But would Russia really violate the nuclear taboo? The nuclear taboo is one of those things that feels like a deep law of history, but it's far more contingent than most people realise. It was very much up for grabs in the early Cold War, and through the 1960s-1980s was largely maintained due to factors like (i) well-defined zones of influence and control, (ii) reasonable parity in conventional weapons, and (iii) fear of rapid escalation towards a full strategic exchange. None of those factors apply anything like so strongly nowadays: Russia's weakness relative to the EU and the West as well as emerging powers means it can no longer maintain control over its old sphere of influence; Russia's military might is dramatically inferior to what it once was; and there is far less likelihood of either the West or East deciding to go 'all-in' on a full blown pre-emptive counterforce strike if things start to get hairy. My sense is that the nuclear taboo is in a very fragile state, and its persistence in a post Cold War world is very much up-for-grabs.
It's often been pointed out (including by me) that 'battlefield nukes' are of limited operational value, at least in the absence of the massive tank formations and chokepoints of the Cold War in Europe. However, there are plenty of ways Russia could make effective use of nuclear weapons to stave off a defeat, such as targeting Ukrainian command and control, infrastructure, and logistics hubs behind the frontlines. This would obviously result in civilian casualties, but judicious target selection and the use of smaller warheads could limit these to perhaps 100,000 or so. Also note that the diplomatic consequences of using 1 nuke are not significantly less than the consequences of using 15 or so, hence Russia could do a lot of damage to Ukraine at relatively fixed cost to itself.
But wouldn't the West respond? Honestly, I doubt it. The second a nuke goes off in Ukraine, there will be large scale panic in Western populations. Russia would probably say something ambiguous like "any direct offensive retaliation from NATO will be met in kind, utilising all appropriate weapons systems at our disposal". While Biden might be tempted to do something like sink the Black Sea fleet, most Europeans would likely push him to take a diplomatic approach, condemning the attacks wholeheartedly and putting increasing pressure on China and India to distance themselves from Russia. I think there's a good chance this would work, and Russia would be left extremely isolated, which is why I still think Putin will refrain from using nuclear weapons. But note that neither India nor China are currently critical to Russia's war effort; its main external weapons supplies have been coming from North Korea and Iran, countries unlike to switch posture as a consequence of a first-use of nuclear weapons by Russia.
So, to give a concrete scenario: in September 2023, after nine months of attritional warfare, the UAF finally make a major breakthrough in Zaporizhzhia and are pushing south towards Melitopol and Mariupol. Russia's hard-won land-bridge to Crimea looks under threat. Russia responds by launching 15-20 nuclear-tipped Iskander missiles at Ukrainian military C3 and logistics, halting the advance and giving Russian force time to regroup and counter-attack. Immediately before the launch, Russia would notify NATO as to what it was doing, and warn them not to interfere. The gambit works, Ukrainian forces are decimated and fall back. Russia announces that any further attempts to attack its territory will be met with nuclear response, and attempts to freeze the conflict.
I'm not saying this is likely - but if I was a diehard Russian nationalist facing defeat, I'd be seriously considering how I could best use nuclear weapons to force a favourable end to the war. Hence 20-25% seems about right for me.
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I've always thought this argument would be deeply unconvincing to anybody living in Russia or Japan. To them it might sound like
If this taboo needs to be enforced with the might of a thousand gods, the United States cannot be allowed to continue to exist. If they are allowed to exist after using nukes - well maybe their enemies have a chance of achieving the same feat.
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