Does this report reflect the views of the Cascade Institute (and Royal Roads University) broadly?

The views expressed in it are solely those of the authors.

Who funded this report and who did you collaborate with?

It was funded by the Global Risk Institute. The authors integrated evidence and opinion gathered from confidential interviews of a diverse group of field experts, both in the US and abroad, some of whom identify as ideologically conservative.

Why did you focus on the impacts of a Trump reelection rather than a Harris election? Isn’t that biased?

The Cascade Institute is non-partisan. Our work is not conducted to support the aims of specific political parties, firms, or special interests. This particular report is intended to provide policymakers, the investment community, public commentators, and risk analysts with a rigorous assessment of the entangled global inter-systemic risks that could emerge from a Trump reelection (or a contested election) to help these groups navigate this evolving landscape.

The Cascade Institute’s Polycrisis program focuses on global systems vulnerable to failures that could escalate to systemic crises. As the report says in its opening paragraphs, the Harris-Walz campaign is largely focused on stabilizing these systems and pursuing status-quo policies. The Trump-Vance campaign—with its proposals to deport millions of immigrants, drastically raise tariffs, make US foreign policy more explicitly transactional, and the like—explicitly proposes to disrupt the domestic and global status quo and the systems sustaining that status quo.

Our decision to focus on the impacts of a second Trump administration does not stem from our partisan preferences, nor from any inherent ideological bias. It is a direct consequence of our concern about the worsening global polycrisis. Donald Trump is a proud and masterful system disruptor. Much of his popularity comes from his rhetoric about “dismantling the administrative state,” “draining the swamp,” and so forth. From the Cascade Institute’s systems perspective, he poses a unique challenge to already strained global systems. If a Democratic candidate were to propose a policy agenda likely to be similarly disruptive to global systems, we would focus our analysis on that candidate for the same reasons.