Forecasts
Greymantle treats forecasting as a core editorial function. We publish annual geopolitical forecasts, election predictions, and scenario analyses – and we stand behind them publicly. Our forecasts are on the record, revisited openly, and grounded in the same non-partisan analytical framework that drives all of our coverage.
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched what is now unmistakably a war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. The initial wave of airstrikes, cyber operations, and follow-on attacks were not symbolic gestures or calibrated signals meant to restore “deterrence.” They were systematic blows against Iran’s military infrastructure, missile forces, and the remaining skeleton of its nuclear program.
Our forecast for 2026 is a gloomy one. We title it ‘Calculus of Fear’ because our baseline view is that the coming year will be defined by the cold calculations of several key actors whose intention will be to intimidate strategic antagonists and domestic opponents alike, rewrite global norms, defy multilateral institutions, and carve the world up into spheres of influence.
Twelve months ago, Greymantle published a 2025 outlook that attempted to map a world drifting toward instability, illusion, and overconfidence. Some of those calls landed squarely on target. Others missed. A few arrived in that territory analysts prefer not to linger in—the grey zone, where you are directionally right, tactically wrong, and forced to explain yourself. This year-in-review does exactly that.
Forecasting events used to be something that I did casually - almost like a hobby. But years of being more right than wrong in my predictions convinced me to start this blog with a small group of collaborators. That's its purpose now - to analyse, to predict, and, hopefully, to give people a clearer view of the forces shaping our world. That's why we write this blog.
In today's post, we veer sharply away from the geopolitical to delve, if ever so briefly, into the deeply personal. Why we write this blog is a tale of a lifelong obsession with forecasts and predictions. Having been eerily correct in foreseeing several critical events, when almost no one else did, convinced us that transforming our forecasting obsession into regular, public exercise was worth a shot.
As we enter 2025, the global landscape is poised for a number of transformative events. The beginning of an economic bubble in the U.S. under the second Trump administration, the likely overthrow of the Iranian regime, and a negotiated armistice to the Russia-Ukraine War are just a few developments with the power to upend global power dynamics. Hence our 2025 Forecast: Resetting the Global Chessboard.
At the start of 2024, Greymantle made 12 major predictions for the year. Ten of them turned out to be correct, an 83% success rate. The really interesting outcomes are the two we got wrong: the reelection of Donald Trump, and Bibi Netanyahu's ability to beat all odds.
In sketching out the three possible paths the incoming Trump administration could take, we must focus first on the incoming president himself. We believe Trump's attitude toward the highest office has changed. It's going to be a case of 'No More Mr. Nice Guy: three possible paths for a second Trump administration'.
Greymantle anticipates that a Harris victory will be supported by five key trends playing out in the swing states: lingering female anger over Roe v. Wade's overturning, the unreliability of young male voters, Trump's refusal to triangulate and tone down his rhetoric, and fewer senior citizen supporters than in 2020.
Through early August, 2024 is behaving true to form. The seismic electoral shifts we had anticipated in January for the EU have occurred right on schedule, and global markets have been volatile. It is the U.S. election, however, that continues to throw off the biggest shocks and upsets, not all of them surprising to this newsletter. Fasten your seatbelts. More turbulence is just ahead.
In 1968, Soviet dissident and world renowned physicist Andrei Sakharov advocated for a gradual convergence of the US and Soviet economies, and an end to the Cold War. His essay became widely known as the 'convergence essay'. What has happened in the years that followed is much stranger: a growing convergence of US and Russian political technologies and styles that Sakharov would have found most ominous.
2024 is going to be a rollercoaster of a year. We predict that Donald Trump will lose the 2024 U.S. presidential election and that China will not invade Taiwan. We're more confident of the second prediction than the first. It's going to be a nail-biter. But don't believe the polls...
On Jan. 1, 2023, this site made five bold predictions for 2023. All five have come to pass. China's economy has badly underperformed expectations, Donald Trump's legal woes have not generated major unrest. Read the full article to learn how the last three shook out, and how we were all 'slaves to the grind' in 2023.
The Israeli-Hamas War now entering its seventh week is quickly evolving into human warfare reduced to its most primordial: an elemental contest of wills between two combatants, in which only one can claim victory and the other is likely to perish.
A quarter century of national disasters and global upheaval has both the U.S. and the wider world on edge. The prevailing mood is a kind of fatalism, lately made worse by the Israel-Hamas conflict. It might behoove us to take a step back to acknowledge that not all recent trends have been bad. The forces of darkness (e.g. Putin's crew, the Iranian regime) have lately suffered some setbacks of their own. It's way too early for fatalism.
Recent events such as the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the Russian military's continued failure to take the Ukrainian town of Bakhmut have been leading me to think more broadly about the nature of failure. The strange thing about failure is that it happens to people and organizations who have long track records of success before they fail spectacularly. Greymantle believes these failures have a common cause: a failure of the imagination.
January is typically a slow month, economically-speaking. After the December holidays, consumers tend to retrench, limiting their spending and paying down credit card balances. Car sales slow, as does home-buying. With winter in full swing and mid-term breaks not arriving until March, few families with school age children take vacations in January, squeezing the tourism […]
Thanks to a mild northern hemisphere winter, natural gas and other fuel prices have dropped significantly, particularly in Europe, and a spike in European social unrest feared by many last autumn has failed to materialize, with the UK being a notable exception.
As befits the first day of a new solar year, and in keeping with our promises made one week ago, Greymantle is providing the following brief 'look ahead' to the new year 2023.The bottom line for the coming year: don't expect as much upheaval as occurred in 2022, but more a steady drip of less history-making events.
2022 will go down in history as a major turning point in world events. 2022 in Review: Annus Horribilis, Annus Mirabilis.
Russia decided not to nuke Ukraine last month. Thank God! We have never been so happy to be wrong about one of our forecasts.
The biggest and scariest event of 2022 is about to happen: the use of a battlefield nuke by Russia.
People have been saying that the end is nigh for 2000 years now.
The 2021 off-year elections have concluded and already every Chicken Little in the US is clucking that the Democrats are in for a historic drubbing in 2022 as if it were foreordained by the gods. "It's going to be 1994 all over again!" "Get ready for a repeat of 2010!" Not so. There are several reasons why the Democrats are set to outperform.