I'm drafting a post for the end of the year based on something I wrote last January about the stability of certain Latin American governments. Looking back at 2009, my analysis in January about which countries could face serious instability was fairly accurate with a few exceptions. Then again, my predictions weren't too specific. I didn't predict there would be a military coup in Honduras in late June. Rather, Honduras was among a list of countries that for various political, economic and security reasons I saw as having a high percentage chance of facing instability (and I unfortunately turned out to be right). Similarly, Guatemala and Paraguay saw serious threats to their governments, though they survived, and several other governments faced instability of other types.
For the purposes of stability analysis, government overthrows are the sorts of events that I place in a "predictable surprises" category. We know that the government in some country (possibly several countries) somewhere in the world will be overthrown next year. We can perhaps come up with lists of where it's most likely to occur, place percentage chances on the event, identify factors that make it more likely or look for signals we might see ahead of time, but there remains a huge amount of uncertainty and chance in the analysis. The ability to determine where, how or exactly when are limited.
I preview that post today because Newsweek takes a different tact looking at next year. For 2010, the weekly news magazine predicts Fidel's death and a military coup in Venezuela. There is some minimal reasoning behind each, but really, they're just 2 of 10 shots in the dark taken by the magazine (which also predicts an economic boom for Brazil). In predicting a specific death and coup, Newsweek isn't providing analysis for its readers; it is engaging in guessing games about Latin America's future.
I'd differentiate what Newsweek writes with predicting the outcome of democratic elections, which can be done fairly analytically and doesn't usually portend doom. I'd also differentiate it from the outrage earlier this year when a US military study said Mexico was at risk for becoming a failed state. There was plenty of debate and disagreements over that analysis, but to its credit, it was interesting future scenario planning that tried to look at a broader threat, not predict the imminent collapse of a neighbor in the next year as part of a top 10 list.
I realize Newsweek is just being cute with their article and trying to draw readers by being controversial. However, playing top 10 list guessing games with the potential overthrows of governments really isn't really what the mainstream US media should be writing about. Is it possible that Newsweek is correct on one or both predictions? Yes it's possible, but that still doesn't mean it's good analysis or responsible journalism.
