From Stabilizer to Variable: Why U.S. Politics Sit at the Heart of 2026’s Global Risks

From Stabilizer to Variable: Why U.S. Politics Sit at the Heart of 2026’s Global Risks

2026 opens with a useful reminder that geopolitics rarely shifts through clean, ceremonial “turning points.” It shifts through accumulated incentives, institutional stress, and leaders testing what they can get away with—until markets, alliances, and security postures suddenly behave as if the world has already changed. What’s striking this year is how many of the biggest global risks now trace back to the same origin story: the United States is no longer just a stabilizer (or a disruptor) of the international order; it is increasingly a variable inside the system—an unpredictable force that other powers are planning around.

Multiple major risk outlooks put the United States at the center of 2026’s global risk map, arguing that domestic political transformation in Washington is spilling outward into trade, alliance credibility, and crisis management capacity. Eurasia Group’s 2026 “Top Risks” frames its leading concern as a U.S. “political revolution” that erodes checks on executive power and turns the machinery of government into a weapon in domestic conflict, making the U.S. itself the principal source of global instability this year.

That dynamic matters because, in practice, American power is not only aircraft carriers and the dollar. It is also the credibility of commitments, the predictability of rulemaking, and the reassurance allies feel when they calculate whether Washington will show up in a crisis. As those assumptions wobble, the world doesn’t become neatly “multipolar.” It becomes opportunistic and crowded—full of regional tests, transactional deals, and rivals probing for seams.

You can already see the pattern in the Western Hemisphere. The Trump administration’s posture toward Latin America is described in Eurasia Group’s framework as a kind of Monroe Doctrine revival—asserting control in the neighborhood while stepping back from being “the world’s policeman.” In early January, that orientation showed up vividly in Venezuela policy: President Trump declared a national emergency tied to Venezuelan oil revenues held by the U.S. government, casting the funds as strategically important to U.S. national security and regional stability amid a fast-moving Venezuela story that includes the reported capture of Nicolás Maduro and U.S. efforts to shape what comes next. Regardless of where one stands on the merits, the broader signal is hard to miss: Washington is using financial controls, emergency authorities, and bilateral leverage as primary instruments of hemispheric strategy. That can deliver rapid wins, but it also raises the odds of backlash, proxy competition, and legitimacy crises—especially if neighbors conclude that sovereignty is negotiable when U.S. interests are involved.

Zoom out and the same U.S.-centric volatility echoes across three other arenas that will define 2026: alliance security in Europe, strategic competition with China, and the accelerating weaponization of technology and information.

Europe’s risk profile this year is less about a single battlefield line and more about the political and infrastructural conditions that make Europe easier to pressure. Several outlooks describe a continent under strain: political fragmentation, fiscal constraints, and a widening gap between the security demands created by Russia and the resources and unity required to meet them. Eurasia Group explicitly flags “Europe under siege,” arguing that weakening political centers in major European powers reduce Europe’s ability to fill a security vacuum if the U.S. retreats or becomes unreliable.

At the sharp end of that risk sits the gray zone—hybrid tactics that punish societies without triggering a clean military response. NATO’s own leadership has warned it must be ready to respond to increasing hybrid threats. Intelligence and security analysis increasingly emphasizes sabotage, cyber intrusion, disinformation, and infrastructure disruption as the “low-cost, deniable” methods that can erode public confidence and impose economic pain. And Europe is getting real-world demonstrations of vulnerability: a major Berlin power outage affecting around 100,000 people has been investigated as deliberate sabotage (an arson attack), surfacing concerns about how exposed dense, aging infrastructure networks can be to political violence or coercion. You don’t need an invasion for strategic pressure to work if you can periodically turn modern life—power, rail, data centers, ports—into an anxiety machine.

The war in Ukraine still anchors this threat environment, not only because of battlefield outcomes, but because the longer it persists, the more it normalizes a world where escalation ladders include cyber, drones, maritime disruption, sanctions evasion, and covert action. International Crisis Group’s “Conflicts to Watch” list for 2026 underscores that major wars and state breakdowns remain active engines of global turbulence, with Ukraine and Sudan among the conflicts shaping wider instability. The danger for 2026 is not merely that a conflict expands geographically; it’s that the habits of conflict—coercion below the threshold, attacks on logistics and infrastructure, strategic disinformation—become the default language of statecraft.

Meanwhile, the U.S.–China competition is evolving into a contest over the “operating system” of the global economy: energy, industrial policy, critical minerals, and the standards that govern emerging technologies. One of the more interesting framings in the 2026 risk discussion is that China is “betting on electrons” while the U.S. is “betting on molecules”—a shorthand for how electrification, clean tech supply chains, and grid-scale energy systems are becoming a geopolitical lever, just as oil once was. In this view, power in 2026 is not only about who has the strongest military; it’s about who controls the industries that will dominate productivity growth and strategic dependence in the 2030s: batteries, solar, grid equipment, EV supply chains, advanced manufacturing, and the AI-linked demand for electricity and cooling.

That’s where domestic U.S. politics loops back into global power dynamics. If Washington’s policy environment becomes more transactional, more punitive, and more subject to abrupt reversals, allies and partners will hedge. Some will hedge toward China in industrial ecosystems even if they hedge toward the U.S. in security. Others will try to build “mini-lateral” coalitions, regional payment rails, or localized supply chains to reduce exposure to American policy shocks. The result is not clean decoupling; it is fragmentation by sector—chips here, energy tech there, AI compute somewhere else—creating higher costs, more duplication, and more frequent trade disputes.

Trade and economic coercion will be an especially active risk channel in 2026 because it sits at the intersection of domestic politics and foreign policy. The IMF’s October 2025 outlook already described a “new global economic landscape” shaped by reordering U.S. policy priorities and adaptation elsewhere, with trade headlines driving perceptions and downside risks remaining significant. Global growth is projected to slow into 2026, which matters because slower growth reduces the political oxygen leaders have to compromise; it makes tariffs, subsidies, and “buy national” policies more tempting at home—and more provocative abroad.

Layered onto this is a technological risk that has moved from “future problem” to present condition: the information environment itself is now a strategic terrain. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks framing has repeatedly emphasized misinformation/disinformation, polarization, and cyber risks as near-term destabilizers because they erode trust and governance capacity. Eurasia Group’s 2026 list goes further by highlighting how AI-driven platforms can intensify manipulation and social regression—less as a sci-fi threat than as an economic and political incentive problem: engagement engines reward outrage, synthetic content cheapens influence operations, and verification lags behind virality. When societies lose shared reality, foreign policy becomes harder too—alliances fracture, elections become permanent crises, and adversaries can trigger overreactions with a handful of forged videos or coordinated narratives.

In practical geopolitical terms, that means 2026’s crises will be faster and noisier. Leaders will face pressure to “do something” before they can confidently verify what’s happening. International SOS’s 2026 risk outlook captures this operationally: many leaders report that new risks emerge faster than they can manage, decision windows are shrinking, and confidence in rapidly verifying information is low. That is exactly the kind of environment where accidents happen—misread signals, escalatory domestic incentives, and rapid retaliation cycles.

Climate and resource stress add a further accelerant, not because climate is “a separate category,” but because it changes the baseline conditions under which states bargain and fight. Water scarcity and water governance failures are increasingly described as conflict multipliers and tools of coercion, particularly in parts of Asia and Africa, with knock-on effects through food prices, migration, and political legitimacy. At the same time, climate-driven extremes and the infrastructure needed for the AI-and-electrification era (grids, data centers, cooling water, transmission lines) create more choke points—more places where disruption, whether from weather or sabotage, can have outsized consequences.

Put these threads together and the top risks in 2026 aren’t best understood as a neat list. They behave more like a system of coupled pressures:

America’s internal political trajectory changes the reliability of its external commitments. That uncertainty weakens deterrence and encourages regional tests. Those tests increasingly take hybrid forms that target infrastructure and public trust. The information environment—now supercharged by AI—amplifies confusion and speeds up escalation cycles. Economic policy becomes more interventionist and politicized, making trade and investment another arena of coercion. And climate/resource constraints make states more brittle and societies more combustible.

If you’re looking for the “global power dynamics” headline for 2026, it’s this: power is becoming more situational and more transactional. Countries that can combine energy resilience, industrial capacity, technological leverage, and narrative control will punch above their weight. Countries that cannot secure grids, manage polarization, or sustain credible alliances will find that even large militaries don’t buy stability at home—or influence abroad.

And for all the attention on big flashpoints, the most dangerous scenario this year may be the one that feels most familiar: a series of medium-sized shocks—an infrastructure sabotage here, a coercive trade move there, a political crisis that paralyzes a major capital, a viral AI-driven disinformation wave during an election—each survivable on its own, but together convincing governments and publics that the world has entered a permanent emergency. That’s the kind of psychological shift that makes extraordinary measures normal, compromise costly, and miscalculation more likely.

2026, in other words, is less a year of one decisive break than a year in which the incentives for breakage are everywhere—and the institutions designed to absorb stress are, in many places, being tested from within.