Forty years of finessing Taiwan’s status may be coming to a dangerous end.

The past year saw voters around the world shake the status quo and reshape longstanding assumptions in elections across Europe, Asia, and Africa.

The global economy will confront serious challenges in the months and years ahead, and looming in the background is a mountain of debt that makes markets nervous—and that thus increases the system's vulnerability to destabilizing shocks. Yet the baseline scenario seems to be one of continuity, with no obvious convulsions on the horizon.