Only 7% of the world’s leading geostrategists believe the United States will be the dominant global power in 2036. Not “declining” or “challenged” – dominant. Just 7%. That figure, drawn from the most comprehensive expert survey of its kind conducted in 2025, is about as stark a number as the field of strategic forecasting has produced in a generation.
The survey behind that finding came from the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, one of Washington’s most credentialed foreign policy institutions. In the fall of 2025, the Scowcroft Center surveyed leading geostrategists and foresight experts around the world, asking them to answer the most pressing questions about the biggest drivers of change over the next ten years. The 447 survey respondents were citizens of 72 countries, the highest number of countries represented in any edition of the survey. The result is the broadest snapshot of expert opinion on the world 2036 predictions that currently exists – and the picture it paints is one that most Western readers will find uncomfortable.
Before diving into the findings, the survey’s composition deserves scrutiny. Respondents were skewed male and older, with roughly three-quarters identifying as male and a similar proportion over 50 years of age. Roughly half were citizens of the United States, more than one-fifth were from Europe, and just under a fifth were from the Global South. These demographics don’t invalidate the survey – subject-matter expertise is unevenly distributed globally, and American and European institutions have historically dominated strategic foresight. But they do mean the results reflect a particular, largely Western, institutional view of what the future holds. With that caveat in place, the findings are significant.
The End of Uncontested American Dominance
Most survey respondents do not believe that the United States will be the world’s dominant power in 2036, with only seven percent saying that it will be. For most of the post-Cold War era, the question of American primacy was treated as a settled matter in strategic circles. The Scowcroft survey suggests that consensus has collapsed.
58 percent of respondents expect China to be the world’s top economic power by 2036, with only 33 percent saying the same of the United States. On the military side, the trend reverses sharply: nearly three-quarters of respondents predict that the United States will remain the world’s leading military power in 2036, though just 37 percent think the world will be better off ten years from now, roughly on par with results from the previous year’s survey.
The likely structure of that competition is also clear. Around nine in ten respondents believe the US and China will compete for supremacy, either in a bipolar world or in a multipolar one. A unipolar moment for China – where Beijing simply replaces Washington as the unchallenged hegemon – was not widely expected either. Most respondents envision a prolonged, grinding rivalry rather than a clean handoff of power. The Center for Strategic and International Studies reached similar conclusions in its scenario analysis of great-power competition, finding that under no modeled scenario was the US-China relationship expected to become fully cooperative, and that bilateral rivalry would remain the defining feature of the international system.
A substantial portion of respondents envision the European Union as an important player in the diplomatic arena, with 17 percent saying the EU will be the world’s foremost diplomatic actor in 2036. Thirty percent believe the EU will be the leading power in cultural or soft power, just below the percentage that say the same of the United States and nearly twice the percentage that foresee China occupying this position.
Europe Rearming – and Becoming More Self-Reliant
For three consecutive years, Global Foresight survey results have shown steadily rising expectations that Europe will have achieved strategic autonomy by 2036 through taking more responsibility for its own security. 57 percent of respondents answered to that effect in the latest survey, up from 48 percent in the previous year.
That expectation tracks directly with NATO’s spending commitments. In 2025, all NATO allies met or exceeded the pre-summit target of investing at least 2% of GDP in defense, the first time all members met the commitment. The bar has since moved significantly higher. NATO allies committed to investing 5% of GDP annually on core defense requirements and defense-related spending by 2035, with 3.5% earmarked for core defense requirements alone.
The fiscal implications of that commitment are substantial. Under NATO’s new 3.5 percent benchmark for 2035, European defense spending could reach about €800 billion by 2030, roughly 2.9 percent of GDP. On the American side, US defense spending amounted to $855 billion in 2024 and is forecast to reach $1.07 trillion by 2035, according to data from Statista drawing on US Congressional Budget Office projections.
The Taiwan question sits at the center of Asia-Pacific security calculations. In May 2026, Taiwan’s legislature passed a $24.8 billion, eight-year special budget to procure arms from the United States – a signal of how seriously Taipei is treating the risk of conflict in the coming decade.
A Dark Mood, and Water Wars
63 percent of respondents expect the world in 2036 to be worse off than it is now. That majority pessimism cuts across the specific findings on power competition and climate – it’s a global assessment that the trajectory of the next ten years is trending negative.
Among the specific threats respondents foresee, water is emerging as a conflict trigger that sits alongside more familiar geopolitical flashpoints. 64 percent of respondents predict that a war over fresh water access will break out before 2036. That figure reflects growing recognition that resource scarcity, not just ideology or territorial ambition, will drive the next generation of armed conflicts. The World Economic Forum’s 2026 Global Risks Report reinforces this concern from a separate angle: estimates suggest that approximately 40 percent of intrastate conflicts over recent decades have been linked to natural resource pressures.
Read More: 2050: The World We’ll Inherit if Climate Change Continues Unchecked
Climate: Hotter World, Declining Political Will
More than 80 percent of respondents expect the world to become hotter over the next decade, including at least one year where the global average temperature is 2 degrees Celsius or more above preindustrial levels. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report corroborates that long-term picture. Extreme weather events retains its position as the top risk for 2036, with half of the top 10 risks environmental in nature. Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse holds second position, followed by critical change to Earth systems at number three.
Political momentum toward addressing these risks appears to be weakening in the short term. Only 19 percent of respondents now believe that climate change will generate the greatest increase in international cooperation over the coming decade, just behind technology governance at 20 percent and well down from the 49 percent who listed climate change just two years ago. That is a collapse in climate optimism – nearly a 30-percentage-point drop in two years – among the very experts who simultaneously predict a hotter, more volatile world.
Over the 10-year time horizon, environmental risks continue to dominate the global risk landscape as they have since 2017, with extreme weather, biodiversity loss, and critical changes to Earth systems ranking among the top positions, reflecting their cumulative and systemic nature.
The near-term picture is different. Geoeconomic confrontation emerges as the top global risk for 2026, climbing eight positions in the two-year outlook, as economic risks rise fastest in the short term, with downturn and inflation risks both surging eight positions year-on-year. The immediate crisis is economic and geopolitical; the decade-long crisis is environmental.
The AI Question: Optimism and Uncertainty
A clear majority of 58 percent believe that by 2036, the world will have gone beyond today’s predictive and generative AI systems to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), defined in the survey as “an artificial intelligence system matching or exceeding the cognitive abilities of human beings across any task.” Researchers and AI practitioners are divided on whether that timeline is realistic, with timelines ranging from optimistic near-term forecasts to assessments placing AGI decades away.
More than half of respondents – 56 percent – expect that on balance AI will have a positive effect on global affairs over the next decade, while less than a third, 32 percent, believe it will have a negative effect. These results suggest the polled experts are generally more optimistic about the technology’s future impact than, for example, the general public in the United States.
The Atlantic Council’s own technology staff expressed caution about AI’s forecasting capabilities when the survey was released. Tess deBlanc-Knowles, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Technology Programs, stated plainly: “I would not trust today’s AI systems to reliably forecast global affairs. That comes down to the fact that so often, global events don’t follow predictable patterns, because so much of global geopolitics is driven by human decisions.”
The same survey that asks human experts to forecast a decade ahead was also tested against AI chatbots given identical questions. Prediction markets, expert surveys, and machine models all share the same fundamental limitation: the decade between now and 2036 will be shaped by decisions not yet made, by leaders not yet in power, and by crises not yet visible.
What This Means for You
The dominant theme running through all the world 2036 predictions examined here is fragmentation. American economic primacy is widely expected to cede ground to China, even as US military spending continues to grow. Europe is rearming and building independent security capacity at a pace unimaginable five years ago. Environmental risks are expected to worsen even as near-term political will to address them declines. The majority of the world’s most experienced strategic thinkers believe the world will be a worse place in ten years than it is today.
Three things follow from these findings. The transition from US economic dominance to a more contested order will not be clean or predictable – the survey’s 90 percent expectation of ongoing US-China competition in a bipolar or multipolar world means prolonged instability, not a settled new hierarchy. Climate-linked resource conflicts, particularly over fresh water, are no longer being treated as remote contingencies by serious analysts; 64 percent predicting water war before 2036 is a figure that should inform investment, infrastructure, and policy decisions now. And AI’s trajectory over the decade will shape much of what the other forecasts look like in practice – if AGI-level systems do arrive by 2036, the economic, military, and governance implications will dwarf most of what the survey’s other findings describe.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.