When judging forecasts about 2016, beware of the “continuity bias”. This is the temptation to assume that this year will be a bit like last year — only more so.
In fact, recent political history suggests that the events that define a year tend to be the big surprises and sudden discontinuities (call them “black swans” or “unknown unknowns”, if you must). At the beginning of 2014, no pundit that I know of was predicting that Russia would annex Crimea or that a jihadist group called Isis would capture Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. And, at the start of 2015, I cannot remember many people predicting that more than 1m refugees would arrive in Germany that year, or foreseeing the improbable rise of Donald Trump in the US.
All this suggests that the most important geopolitical events of 2016 will also be something that the pundits and politicians are not yet talking about. Predicting the unpredictable is a fool’s game — but one I intend to play, nonetheless. The best approach, I think, is to look for potential discontinuities rather than “more of the same”.