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The "next big issue" is likely to arise in some area hardly anyone was thinking about beforehand. You really have two choices: identify every possible contingency, no matter how remote it seems now, resulting in a list too long to really be useful, or identify what you think are the likeliest contigencies based on current trends, only to see the next balloon go up somewhere you weren't thinking about.
Whose reaction to the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands was "yeah, saw that one coming"? How many people had even heard of Grenada before 1983? Of all the Persian Gulf contingencies that were wargamed before 1987, how many do you suppose involved US-flagged Kuwaiti tankers and both Iraqi and Iranian attacks on US vessels? In July 1990, virtually no international security specialist I knew thought Iraq was doing more than saber-rattling. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the "end of history", I doubt many eyes were turning to Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo, though I suppose yet another Haitian intervention was predictable.
On the flip-side, the list of possible contingencies which did not come to pass is also quite long, though in some cases, such as another Korean War, it may just be a matter of time. In the early 1990s, I had a colleague in the intelligence community who thought either a North Korean invasion or collapse was likely before the end of the decade. Also in the 1990s, I thought the insurgency in Colombia was heading toward direct US intervention. In 2003, a large-scale intervention in Liberia seemed like a distinct possibility.
BTW, Pete's suggestion is a good one. As long as you are savvy enough to observe and correct for their biases, the BBC is good at covering events in obscure places the mainstream media ignore. The VOA and RFE/RL are also good. Even al-Jazeera has its uses - the bias may be worse, but the network has more on-the-ground coverage of the Muslim world than any of the American or European networks.
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