Who’s afraid of a geopolitical hard landing?

Three ways of thinking about a worrying moment for the world. FEBRUARY 27, 2024  |  [VIEW IN BROWSER](  |  [SUBSCRIBE](     Mark Harris Illustration for Foreign Policy Geopolitics is now a much more pessimistic field than the dismal science, Jared Cohen argues. Economists may be forecasting a soft landing in 2024, but with wars in the Middle East and Europe and rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific, a geopolitical hard landing could [get in the way](. “Today’s geopolitical challenges aren’t transitory—they’re here to stay,” writes Cohen, the president of global affairs at Goldman Sachs. “They require timely interventions that consider the realities of politics and resources, as well as factors like fear, honor, and interest.” This is, of course, not the first time that geopolitical considerations have impeded global trade and capital flows. A couple of weeks before Cohen’s warning of a geopolitical hard landing, the International Monetary Fund’s Gita Gopinath [sounded the alarm]( in FP about an increasingly fragmented global economy. She advised policymakers to look to blueprints from the Cold War for how to avoid a worst-case scenario. “Keeping open the lines of communication—as is being done by the United States, China, and the EU—can help prevent the worst outcomes from occurring,” Gopinath argued. “The nonaligned countries, which are mainly emerging and developing countries, can deploy their economic and diplomatic heft to keep the world integrated.” Jakub Grygiel and A. Wess Mitchell frame the challenges facing the world, and in particular the United States, in different terms: “Historically, the strength of a great power and the political order it embodies have been shaped by [events on the frontier]( more than events in the relatively safer confines of the imperial interior.” The American frontier, Grygiel and Mitchell argue, is in crisis, and given that, “the United States’ best bet is to prevent its rivals’ probes on the frontier from becoming a wider, systemwide run on the bank.”—The Editors   New and Noteworthy - [Supporting Brazil’s Democracy:]( U.S. President Joe Biden’s “stated commitment to defending democracy worldwide is often brushed off as mere rhetoric,” Oliver Stuenkel writes. 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