As SNS members are aware, we have just released our Top 10 Predictions for 2026 at our annual Predictions event, for the first time held live in Seattle; you can view a recording of that session soon as a benefit of your membership.

Because we'll be sharing the complete recorded event - together with discussions and Q&A - I'm refraining here from transcribing or converting all of my thoughts on the economic, technological, and country landscapes upon which these predictions are based.

Rather, in this issue I've outlined a greater number of predictions in all these areas, in the hopes that this is more useful to our members.

As in 2025's Predictions recap, the idea here is to move from a detail-driven, very long conversation to getting the main points across and allowing enough intellectual breathing room for members to stop often, digest, make inner comments and arguments, compare with their own ideas of what's coming, and reach useful solutions.

We'll be covering these megatrends:

As foretold by last year's theme - "The CRINK Effect: A Two-Front World in an All-Fronts War" - 2025 has seen the rapid devolution from China's all-fronts economic global attacks against the West, abetted via its CRINK alliance members, into a series of kinetic attacks, with expanded effort in all other domains. Following Russia's long-term focus on tearing down the opposition (vs. winning for its own benefit), the West has also turned to an increasing number of kinetic responses around the globe. With China, Russia, and the US fighting one another on every front, from AI to currencies, we are now in a new global era of three-power instability, further degraded by the worldwide deployment of unreliable AI systems.

Here are the Landscapes, followed by the Top 10 Predictions for the year ahead.

LANDSCAPES

Let's start with countries.

Countries in 2026

CRINK: The alliance of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea is both tighter, and now bigger, than ever. What once looked like an alliance of partners now looks more like Chinese global aggression in its unmitigated goal of global domination. The earlier internal Chinese Communist Party (CCP) memes of "It's our turn" and "Made in China 2025," perhaps spiced up with the violent intent behind its "Wolf Warrior" cultural push, now look both prophetic and outdated at the same time. In a strange sense, CRINK is diminished - albeit more active than ever - and China's role is more stark in pushing all available nations into its fold.

China: The West continues to be confused by the issue that China does not really have a domestic economy: profits are unimportant to the CCP, companies are neither private nor public, audits are perceived as Western spying and made virtually impossible, and banks are little more than extensions of the Politburo's flavor of the moment, in the larger scheme of IP theft and subsidization (in their nomenclature, "digestion and re-innovation").

Ironically, tariffs and economic disengagement, when combined with other means of reducing opportunities for theft of intellectual property, are the only effective responses to this InfoMerc model. Just as a bank robber and a banker look at money differently, China and the West have different views of money.

Russia: It should be clear to anyone paying attention that:

A) Putin will never quit his war with Ukraine until he has won, no matter how many steps or treaties punctuate this process; and, unfortunately,

B) Putin controls Trump. At least based on past performance, this control appears to be complete. Based on actions (not words), there is little-to-no daylight between what is good for Russia and what Trump has done. The exception here may be represented by his sanctions on Russian oil, although one could make the argument that these, while sounding impressive, have had almost no effect on Russia's sales (except, perhaps, to increase them to China), and therefore further the argument.

Iran: Contrary to comments at the time, it appears that the US/Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities may in fact have either ended these activities or set them back much more than generally believed. With Hamas being bulldozed out of existence in Gaza, Hezbollah being hunted by the Lebanese army, and the Houthis rapidly evading Iranian control, this country is now living its worst nightmare: having to go it alone, risking direct additional attacks, and with a go-nowhere economy that puts an ailing religious zealot at political risk.

North Korea: By enhancing its ties to Russia, NK has managed to gain a little leverage vs. its owner and landlord, China. The nukes and missiles sent by Iran are the reason.

Germany: Unlike the UK, Germany seems to see China as its top adversarial threat, with special notice of that posed by China's EV subsidization and export programs, aimed directly at the heart of the German car-driven economy. Together with increased spending on defense, this bodes well for both the country and the EU. Small, but significant, steps.

UK: This is what I wrote last year: "With Labour back in power, who didn't foresee a replay of the craven 'David Cameron Loves China' show? It didn't take too many minutes before PM Starmer was sending love letters over to Beijing, hoping it would appear for more trade handouts, if only he would make nice. Stop it, Keir; you're embarrassing everyone."

Nothing has changed, which is a good description of the UK in general.

Japan: From last year: "Another in what seems an endless list of prime-minister replacements leaves Japan as a bit of a question mark, when the free world (and the Quad) needs a strong Pacific partner."

And now, in the person of Sanae Takaichi, Japan's new PM, we seem to have someone who is unafraid of China's threats and actions, suddenly heading into a snap election. How exciting to find a new leader in the free world who is willing to stand up and be counted, on everything from its own sovereignty and military spending to economic freedom.

Australia: PM Albanese seems to have acquired some sense of balance in his country's difficult tightrope walk, between his top security partner and his top trade partner. All alliances remain intact, and Oz remains a critical security partner - a focal point for Western defense plans in the Pacific.

Major Areas of Technical Interest and Contest

Even as the Valley hype machine pushes on, the rest of the world increasingly pushes back on what GPT cannot do, and should not be allowed to. The result will include broken promises to CEOs on performance by their tech teams, broken careers, and bankrupt companies that drank the GPT Kool-Aid. Companies that make restricted and moderate use of GPT will prosper, while those that overpromised will suffer greatly.

The world has moved from the OpenAI AGI "threat or menace," FOMO, and existential end-of-times sales promise to the recent recant by Sequoia VC partners, redefining AGI as "It figures stuff out." Wow.

LLMs will continue to improve their service offerings and will never be what Sam Altman claimed. Applications built on LLMs are having their turn - even as next-gen AI platform companies, without the risk baggage of endless class-action lawsuits, are beginning to show promise.

While Nvidia continues what to date has been an unassailable position in the self-declared domain of "AI factories," it has in fact increased its vulnerability in two mirrored ways: its top five customers (in cloud) are now all becoming competitors by making their own, cheaper versions of AI chips; and by moving directly into its users' markets, such as autonomous cars and drug discovery.

If you wonder what happens to monopolies whose top customers become their top competitors, just ask Boeing how it feels about China - but don't ask in public.

Remember the last three times you heard Peak Oil stories out of Wall Street? What a joke. For the moment, the world is awash in energy, in oil, in gas, with solar coming on strong. Getting energy is not the problem, at the moment, but rather getting it from the right places: modular fission is on the up but still faces permit delays, while geothermal looks promising, doesn't need storage, has no diurnal variation, and can be done in many places around the planet using current fracking technology. The main problem now on the horizon: GPT practices may eat up all the surplus promised, and more.

Unfortunately for the field of healthcare (and its patients), the rush to implement GPT/GAI technologies has far outrun anyone's ability to prevent the inevitable dangerous, and fatal, mistakes that accompany hallucinations injected into this field.

Healthcare, of all fields, should have been protected from the use of flawed software - but money appears to be more important. Now it falls to hospital system owners, practitioners, and perhaps some patients to avoid what should have been completely avoidable harm. The Hippocratic Oath has just lost the near-term contest with Valley BS.

The good news is that there will certainly be an acceleration in new discoveries. The bad news: the Valley mantra that "quantity = quality" could not be more wrong.

The Top 10 Predictions for 2026

I hope these predictions and observations are useful for our members, and that one use will be to improve your coming year, on whichever beneficial path you choose.

Your comments are always welcome.

Sincerely,

Mark Anderson

[email protected]