Ray Dalio, retired founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, warned this week that the Israel-Hamas conflict marks “another step toward international war.”
“It appears to me that the odds of transitioning from the contained conflicts to a more uncontained hot world war that includes the major powers have risen from 35% to about 50% over the last two years,” the billionaire wrote in a Thursday Linkedin post.
Dalio is a student of history who has written multiple books on the major issues facing the global economy today and how those issues have been resolved (or made worse) historically, including the aptly named Principles for Dealing With the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail and Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises.
Now, Dalio says he believes both the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars will be “brutal” until the end. And even worse, he fears the conflicts won’t end “until one side clearly defeats the other” or the world’s superpowers push for peace.
“These types of brutal wars are more likely to spread than subside,” he said. “I hope that the emerging picture of what this would look like will encourage restraint at this critical juncture of being on the brink.”
Dalio has repeatedly warned that tensions are brewing both between the world superpowers and within certain nations, arguing that geopolitical instability will become the norm this decade. In April, he said that the U.S. and China were “on the brink of going to war with each other,” citing simmering tensions over issues including Taiwan and intellectual property theft.
Dalio has long been a proponent of China and invested heavily in the nation, even going so far as to found the Beijing Dalio China Foundation in 2013 to fund education and child welfare programs there. As of January 2023, Bridgewater held roughly $2.9 billion in assets in China. Although Dalio no longer directs the investments of the fund, having passed the torch last year to current CEO Nir Bar Dea, the billionaire is receiving $1 billion in annual payments from the firm after signing a lucrative exit package.
The good news, according to Dalio? While the Middle East and Europe remain stuck in their own violent conflicts, the relationship between the U.S. and China is still repairable, he says.
“Fortunately, the progression toward a world war between the biggest powers (the U.S. and China) has not yet crossed the irreversible line from being containable (which it is now) to becoming a brutal war between the biggest powers and their allies,” he wrote.
The hedge funder concluded with what he labeled his “pipe dream”—that China and the U.S. would come together to broker a lasting peace in Ukraine.
“If they did that, maybe they could develop a dynamic that would bring about peace rather than conflict in other cases,” he wrote, referring to the conflict in the Middle East. “Imagine how great an alliance in pursuit of world peace between the two greatest opposing countries would be.”
