Welcome to 2036

(Mary Kate Aylward, Peter Engelke, Uri Friedman, and Paul Kielstra – Atlantic Council) China eclipses the United States economically. A diminished Russia’s war in Ukraine becomes a frozen one, while conflict over Taiwan turns hot and threatens world war. More countries acquire nuclear weapons. A democratic depression coincides with the decline of today’s multilateral system. Cryptocurrencies challenge the dollar. Artificial intelligence matches or even surpasses human capabilities. NATO endures, but fundamentally changes. These are just some of the future scenarios that geostrategists and foresight practitioners pointed to when the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security surveyed them in November and December 2025 on how they expect the world to change over the next ten years. We found respondents generally in a dark mood, with 63 percent expecting the world in 2036 to be worse off than it is now. Just 37 percent think that it will be better off ten years hence—roughly on par with the results of this temperature-check question in the previous year’s survey. The 447 survey respondents were citizens of 72 countries—the highest number of countries represented in the four years we’ve been conducting our annual Global Foresight survey. Roughly half were citizens of the United States, more than one-fifth were from Europe, and just under a fifth were from countries in the so-called Global South. Respondents skewed male and older (roughly three-quarters were male and a similar proportion were over 50 years of age) and were dispersed across the private sector, nonprofits (think tanks, advocacy groups, non-governmental organizations), government, academic or educational institutions, independent consultancies, and multilateral institutions. So what kind of world do these forecasters envision in 2036?

Welcome to 2036: What the world could look like in ten years, according to nearly 450 experts – Atlantic Council