Energy-driven escalation dominates the outlook: Ukraine's refinery war grinds on with no truce in sight, US-Iran brinkmanship pushes Brent above $100 even as a full US kinetic strike stays the less-likely branch, and Republican pressure for a diesel export ban meets hard trade-flow limits. A record-strength El Niño simultaneously stresses European water systems and primes new global heat records, while defense-AI institutionalization and German auto-sector labor unrest round out the medium-term picture.

The base rate genuinely favors this: EU/platform attribution and takedowns of Russia-linked influence operations in eastern Europe are near-routine on a 90-day horizon (recurring Meta/EU DisinfoLab disclosures), and Romania's contested-election context makes it a prime target. Skeptic gave a strong endorsement (risk 81, adjusted 0.64), and the cyber platform-governance chain plus the Russia-West chain (ESCALATION) reinforce it. Important self-correction: my cybersecurity track record is FAILING (Brier 0.679 on limited n), so per protocol I lean on the Skeptic and the analyst's base-rate logic rather than my own model, and I widen my interval. Rather than compressing toward 50% — which the strong base rate argues against — I hold at 0.68 (above the dead zone but modestly above the Skeptic's 0.64), explicitly deferring to the routine-exposure base rate. What could make me wrong: 'new' network requirement is stricter than routine reporting; attribution may be delayed beyond 90 days; disclosures may target other states, not Romania. Pillars: Information Warfare + Threat-Actor Analysis.