Dear 2017, please surprise us

At the end of 2016, a year of stunning political upsets, POLITICO asked writers: What would surprise you most about the coming 12 months?

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This will be the year of the barbarians

“The old order changeth, yielding place to new” — the words spoken by Tennyson’s moribund King Arthur as he disappears into the mists of Avalon have never seemed more apt or menacing. Only fundamentalists, however, will be convinced by the notion that recent developments might be the plan of a “God who fulfills himself in many ways.”

What can one foresee, then, for the coming year but more and more drastic change, as old momentums peter out and new forces — good, bad and above all unruly — rush in to fill the vacuum?

This will be the year of the barbarians: former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, the Italian 5Star Movement’s Beppe Grillo, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and many others. The European Union is now more a centrifugal than centripetal force; the euro more a problem than a solution. And German Chancellor Angela Merkel is too tired and unimaginative to hold the dissolution in check.

It will be a huge achievement, or marvelous luck, if we get through 2017 without mass slaughter, some serious redrawing of borders in Eastern Europe, another country asking to leave the Union or more cities destroyed in the Middle East. The best we can hope for is trade wars, rather than real ones. The idea that mutually assured destruction guarantees that no one do something MAD will be severely tested in the not-too-distant future.

Tim Parks is a novelist, writer and translator who lives in Verona, Italy.

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Oh, for some dullness

In 2016, I cataclysmically misjudged the possibility of Brexit and Trump. I look forward to 2017 with trepidation.

As an expat in France, my next unpleasant surprise may well be the arrival of Madame la Présidente Marine Le Pen. Every rational instinct I possess tells me this can’t happen, but that’s what I thought about Brexit and Trump.

On that same counterintuitive principal, I have a nagging feeling that we will also soon have a Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Theresa May doesn’t look like she’s in for the long haul — but, then again, I may be surprised.

More than once, I hoped we’d seen the last of the egregious cartoon that is Nigel Farage, but my now mounting pessimism suggests he’ll only gain in prominence next year. After all, he is the perfect man for our depressing political times.

I keep thinking of that old Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” Oh, for some dullness.

William Boyd is a novelist and screenwriter. 

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To wake up from our Trump nightmare

Here’s what would surprise me in 2017: A Saul-of-Tarsus-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment awakens Trump, just in time, to the difference between reality TV and reality. He admits he is unqualified to be president and voluntarily cedes power to moderate Republicans. (Clearly, 2016 has lowered my expectations.)

They, in turn, open their eyes to how deeply scarred and wounded our country is and vow to work together with Democrats to halt climate change, improve affordable health care and public education, safeguard women’s rights, end poverty and racism, stop the mass deportations that occurred during U.S. President Barack Obama’s tenure, and so forth. Surprise me, please, 2017.

Francine Prose is an American novelist and critic. She is a visiting professor of literature at Bard College in New York.

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The international community steps up

What would surprise me most would be if the West shook itself awake this year and realized it, too, shares the blame for the crises that have spread global disorder and undermined the international community’s cooperative ethos.

Turkey has stumbled badly in a region deeply shaken by the aftermath of the West’s disastrous failure to head off wars in Syria, Iraq and beyond. To be sure, Ankara brought many of its troubles on itself, whether through short-sighted policies or authoritarian overreach.

But what about the U.S. and the EU turning a blind eye to abuses in return for strategic favors? What about the sudden flurry of aid from Brussels when refugees began to arrive in Europe, but the EU’s self-defeating failure to give Ankara the broadest, timeliest support when millions arrived in Turkey?

The biggest surprise of all would be for the West to not only recognize its failings and hypocrisies, but to do something about them — realigning its policies to reflect that the prime cause of refugee flows and Islamic radicalization is war and deprivation, and that the answer is not to send aid packages and enforce tougher security measures, but to invest in long-term conflict prevention work.

Hugh Pope, whose books include “Turkey Unveiled” (Overlook, 2011) and “Sons of the Conquerors: The rise of the Turkic world” (Overlook, 2006), is the International Crisis Group’s director of communications & outreach.

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A year of life and death

What if last year’s nationalist and isolationist reactions to the rise of international terrorism and the global refugee crisis led to greater stability, prosperity and safety in 2017? That would be a surprise. In W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” (a time that bears some comparison to today), he wrote:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

Love one another or die. That, I believe, is the choice we have to face in 2017.

Elliot Ackerman is the author of the novel “Dark at the Crossing.” Based in Istanbul, he has covered the Syrian conflict since 2013.

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Revolutions laid to rest

As 2016 closes, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has evicted revolutionaries from key Damascus suburbs, retaken eastern Aleppo and is poised to crush remaining rebel strongholds like eastern Ghouta and Idlib — killing anyone standing in its way. The Syrian government’s momentum seems irreversible, especially as foreign powers reduce their already meager support for the rebels while Tehran and Moscow continue to back Assad to the hilt.

Trump’s election has eliminated any pretense of support for the opposition, and the new administration may even collaborate with the regime in the name of “fighting terror.” Rebels may persist years longer in waging a guerrilla war, but prospects for the mainstream opposition — local activists and fighters already caught between Assad and Islamic fundamentalist groups — seem bleaker than ever.

In many ways, Syria is the last active revolutionary struggle of the Arab Spring; movements in countries like Egypt or Bahrain have been suffocated by dictatorship and war. As Assad moves toward victory, 2017 may be the year the Arab Spring is finally laid to rest. So, nothing would surprise me more in the coming year than if, against all odds, the revolutions that shook the world in 2011 somehow caught a second wind.

Anand Gopal, a writer and journalist, has served as an Afghanistan correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and reported on the Middle East and South Asia.

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Not another annus horribilis

Short of a UFO invasion, no new tragedy could surprise me. Here in Turkey, we have gone through an annus horribilis, with dozens of bombings, arrests, several attacks by the Islamic State, an assassination and even an attempted coup. You feel part of a historic documentary when you see your country fall apart at such accelerated speed.

That is why most Turks celebrated the departure of 2016. “Good riddance,” was what everyone said to each other on New Year’s Eve — only to be reminded a few hours later that the numeric change of years will not matter all that much. With a devastating attack on a nightclub a short stroll from where I live, the magic of the New Year is already gone.

My expectations for 2017 are already low. But what I would like to see is a Turkey that returns to democracy, a Western alliance that renews faith in its own value system, an end to the Syrian war and a crushing defeat for ISIL in Mosul and Raqqa. I would like Donald Trump to surprise me.

These might be ideological issues to someone sitting in London or Paris; to us they’re a matter of life and death.

Aslı Aydıntaşbaş is a journalist based in Istanbul.