The international security environment entering 2026 is marked by an intensity, breadth, and complexity of conflict risks unseen since the end of the Second World War. According to the Center for Preventive Action’s Preventive Priorities Survey 2026, the number of armed conflicts worldwide has reached its highest level in decades, with interstate wars once again becoming more common after a long post–Cold War period dominated by internal conflicts. The survey, now in its eighteenth year, reflects the judgment of approximately 620 American foreign policy experts drawn from government, academia, and the policy community, who assessed thirty discrete contingencies judged plausible within the coming twelve months. Their collective assessment underscores a sobering reality: global anxiety about violent conflict remains undiminished, and U.S. policymakers face an increasingly crowded and volatile risk landscape.
One of the most striking findings of the 2026 survey is the persistence of high-likelihood, high-impact contingencies. Five scenarios fall into this most dangerous category, indicating both a strong probability of occurrence and a direct threat to U.S. national interests that could trigger military involvement. Among these, the war between Russia and Ukraine continues to rank as a top concern. Experts warn that the conflict is likely to intensify further in 2026 through expanded attacks on critical infrastructure and civilian population centers on both sides. This evolution reflects the war’s transition from maneuver warfare to a grinding conflict of attrition, with increasingly severe humanitarian consequences and growing risks of escalation involving NATO.
The Middle East occupies a disproportionately prominent place in the highest-risk tier. Renewed fighting in the Gaza Strip is judged to be both highly likely and highly consequential, driven by escalating clashes between Hamas militants and Israeli security forces. The survey highlights that such renewed conflict would deepen an already dire humanitarian crisis and exacerbate instability across the region. Closely related is the situation in the West Bank, where increased violence between Israeli forces and Palestinians is considered highly likely amid ongoing settlement expansion, disputes over political rights, and the spillover effects of the Gaza war. Together, Gaza and the West Bank exemplify how localized confrontations can have regional and global implications, particularly given U.S. strategic commitments to Israel and broader Middle Eastern stability.
Beyond the immediate Israeli-Palestinian theater, experts also assign high priority to the risk of renewed armed conflict between Iran and Israel. Although assessed as moderately likely rather than highly probable, the potential impact of such a conflict is considered severe. Concerns center on Iranian efforts to reconstitute its nuclear program and rebuild its network of regional proxy groups following the June 2025 twelve-day war. Any direct confrontation between Tehran and Jerusalem could quickly draw in the United States and destabilize the wider Middle East, disrupt global energy markets, and provoke retaliation across multiple fronts.
East Asia represents another critical flashpoint. Intensified Chinese military, economic, and political pressure on Taiwan is rated as a moderate-likelihood but high-impact contingency. Experts warn that such pressure could precipitate a severe cross-strait crisis involving not only China and Taiwan but also the United States and regional allies. The Taiwan Strait scenario exemplifies the enduring risk of great power conflict, where miscalculation or escalation could lead to direct confrontation between nuclear-armed states. Similarly, the resumption of North Korean nuclear weapons tests is assessed as moderately likely and highly impactful, with the potential to trigger armed confrontation on the Korean Peninsula involving multiple regional powers and U.S. forces.
Notably, the survey also places domestic instability within the United States itself among the most serious risks. Growing political violence and popular unrest in the U.S. is rated as both highly likely and highly impactful, reflecting heightened political polarization, the potential deployment of domestic security forces, and the broader erosion of democratic norms. This marks a return to the top tier for a contingency that had previously been downgraded, underscoring expert concern that internal instability could undermine U.S. governance, distract policymakers, and weaken Washington’s capacity to respond effectively to international crises.
Beyond the top tier, the survey’s Tier II contingencies reveal a wide array of conflicts that, while less likely to directly trigger U.S. military intervention, nevertheless pose significant humanitarian, regional, or strategic risks. Africa features prominently here, with Sudan identified as the single most likely conflict to escalate in 2026 among all contingencies surveyed. Experts anticipate that further escalation of Sudan’s civil war could lead to mass atrocities, large-scale civilian displacement, and spillover violence affecting neighboring countries. Although the direct impact on U.S. interests is judged to be relatively low, the scale of human suffering and regional destabilization makes Sudan a priority for preventive diplomacy.
Other Tier II risks include worsening violence in Haiti, where clashes between armed groups and security forces are expected to intensify amid political dysfunction and the failure of international stabilization efforts. In South Sudan, further delays in long-postponed elections are likely to trigger renewed fighting between ethnic and political factions, threatening the fragile central government. In Somalia, the potential withdrawal of U.S. security assistance raises the prospect of increased terrorist attacks and expanded territorial control by groups such as Al-Shabaab and ISIS. These cases illustrate how fragile states, weak governance, and international disengagement can combine to produce cascading security crises.
The Middle East again features heavily in Tier II scenarios, particularly in Yemen, Lebanon, and Syria. Houthi attacks on Israel and international shipping lanes are expected to provoke retaliatory actions that further degrade Yemen’s already shattered state capacity and deepen the humanitarian catastrophe. In Lebanon, the government’s failure to disarm Hezbollah, combined with continued Israeli military strikes, risks igniting a wider sectarian conflict. Syria, meanwhile, faces the prospect of renewed civil war driven by growing sectarian violence, a resurgence of ISIS, and military interventions by Israel and Turkey that weaken central authority and accelerate state fragmentation.
South Asia and the Western Hemisphere are not immune to these dangers. Renewed armed conflict between India and Pakistan is considered a moderate-likelihood, moderate-impact contingency, driven by heightened terrorist activity and repression in Indian-administered Kashmir. In the Americas, heightened concern in the United States over illicit drug production and trafficking raises the possibility of direct U.S. military strikes in Mexico, a low-likelihood but high-impact scenario with profound implications for bilateral relations and regional stability. Similarly, the risk of U.S. military operations escalating into direct strikes in Venezuela, destabilizing the Maduro government, is assessed as a high-likelihood, high-impact contingency and marks one of the most notable new additions to the 2026 survey.
Tier III contingencies, while generally assessed as having lower direct impact on U.S. interests, nevertheless represent serious sources of instability and human suffering. These include growing insurgencies across the Sahel, particularly in Mali, persistent state weakness and Islamist terrorism in northeastern Nigeria, intensifying conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo involving Rwanda-backed militias, and political and religious violence in Bangladesh linked to election delays and governance crises. Myanmar’s accelerating state collapse, Mozambique’s intensifying insurgency, renewed tensions between Ethiopia and Eritrea, and cross-border conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan further illustrate the breadth of global instability confronting policymakers.
The survey’s overall takeaways paint a bleak picture. Of the thirty contingencies assessed, twenty-eight are judged to be either highly or moderately likely to occur in 2026, and seventeen are expected to have a high or moderate impact on U.S. interests. The distribution of risks is geographically broad, but certain patterns stand out. The Middle East remains central to U.S. security concerns, with six conflicts in the region rated as Tier I or Tier II priorities, all involving Israel to some degree. Africa accounts for the largest number of contingencies overall, reflecting the continent’s vulnerability to state collapse, insurgency, and humanitarian crises, even if many of these conflicts are ranked lower in terms of direct U.S. impact.
The persistence of great power rivalry is another defining feature of the 2026 risk environment. Potential crises involving China over Taiwan or in the South China Sea, and between Russia and NATO, are rated as having the potential to draw the United States into direct military confrontation with peer competitors. While some of these scenarios are judged less likely to occur in the immediate term, their catastrophic potential ensures they remain central to strategic planning.
Equally important are the survey’s findings on conflict prevention and resolution. For the first time, respondents were asked to identify promising opportunities where U.S. action could mitigate or avert conflict. A significant number of experts highlighted the Russia-Ukraine war, Gaza, the Taiwan Strait, and the West Bank as areas where U.S. leverage could still make a difference, either through diplomacy, deterrence, or multilateral engagement. Others emphasized the importance of supporting international peace efforts in Sudan, Haiti, Syria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where coordinated action could reduce civilian suffering even if durable political solutions remain elusive.
Taken together, the Preventive Priorities Survey 2026 underscores the growing challenge facing U.S. policymakers in an increasingly violent and disorderly world. The convergence of great power competition, regional conflicts, fragile states, and domestic instability creates a risk environment in which crises are not isolated but interconnected. The survey implicitly warns that neglecting early preventive action, strategic foresight, and international cooperation will only increase the likelihood that the United States will be drawn into costly and reactive interventions. As the global system continues to fragment, the findings of the survey serve as both a diagnostic of current dangers and a call for more deliberate, forward-looking engagement to prevent today’s risks from becoming tomorrow’s wars.
