A succession of foreshocks and aftershocks are reshaping the geopolitical landscape. How will the global politics of 2025 be defined?
If 2024 was the year of democracy, with elections taking place that directly affected more than half of the world’s population, how will 2025 come to be defined?
Given a billionaire is set to return as US president, and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, conveys the impression of being his de facto co-president-elect, perhaps it will be the year of plutocracy. Government by the wealthy.
Or given how many of Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees have questionable qualifications — Robert Kennedy, a vaccine sceptic, has been asked to head the Department of Health and Human Services, while a wrestling impresario, Linda McMahon, is the president-elect’s choice as education secretary — perhaps 2025 could be the year of kakistocracy. The term describes a government run by the state’s least suitable or competent citizens.
Maybe 2025 will be the year of anocracy, which describes a country that is part democracy and part autocracy. Some fear this increasingly voguish term could come to characterise Trump’s America. The incoming president, after all, has joked about becoming a dictator on day one, raised the possibility of terminating the US Constitution and pledged to use the Justice Department and FBI to pursue his political enemies.
The Trump restoration could easily be driven by revenge and retribution. Washington veterans who witnessed the excesses of the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s fear that Trump could make Richard Nixon look like a choir boy. During his transition, he welcomed the idea of imprisoning members of Congress who led the investigation into the storming of the US Capitol — including his Republican nemesis, former congresswoman Liz Cheney — and promised to consider presidential pardons for felons convicted of offences related to the January 6 insurrection.
The simple fact that terms such as kakistocacy and anocracy are not in common usage, nor widely understood, speaks of how we are living in such hard-to-decipher times.
The United Nations, in declaring 2025 the year of quantum science and technology, hardly helped bring clarity. For most people, quantum science is a field shrouded in a fog of uncertainty and incomprehension. It brings to mind a quantum leap into the unknown.
Perhaps that should be our tagline for 2025: The year of the unknown. The final weeks of 2024, which brought a spate of December surprises, underscored the uncertainty of our age.
At the beginning of the month, few would have predicted the fall, after more than half a century of murderous rule, of the House of Assad in Syria. Nor, for the first time since 1980, that martial law would briefly be imposed in South Korea. Easier to foresee was the fall of the French prime minister, Michel Barnier, after the country’s first successful no confidence vote since 1962. Still, the fact that he will become the shortest-serving prime minister in the history of the Fifth Republic speaks of the volatility of our times.
Almost everywhere, the ground is still shaking from a succession of tectonic events that are reshaping the geopolitical landscape, and continually producing foreshocks and aftershocks.
Trump’s first term. The COVID pandemic. The messy withdrawal during the first year of the Biden administration of US forces from Afghanistan. The war in Ukraine. The atrocities of the Hamas terror attack on October 7, and the regional Middle East war they sparked. Then there is the ongoing climate emergency and the rise of generative artificial intelligence, both of which pose civilisational threats.
In trying to predict what lies ahead in 2025, it is important to remember we aren’t clairvoyants. As a forewarning, it is worth recalling the cover art of The Economist’s “The World in 2016” magazine, published on the threshold of the populist wave that brought Brexit in Britain and, five months later, its trans-Atlantic twin, the victory of Trump.
A photo-montage of international figures thought destined to shape 2016 included Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel, Barack Obama, David Cameron, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. But no place was found for Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, the godfathers of the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union, or even Donald Trump.
Preview pieces should come with health warnings and a respectful nod towards the cautionary words of Sir Winston Churchill: “History unfolds itself by strange and unpredictable paths.” One certainty about the future is its uncertainty, a banality which serves as a truism in the age of Donald Trump. And, yes, an age it now is. For near on a decade, he has dominated US and global politics. June 16, 2025, will mark the 10th anniversary of his descent down that fabled golden escalator.
As we enter the new year, there are known knowns. President-elect Trump will take his oath of office at noon on January 20, standing on the very spot that the MAGA militia used as the staging post for the storming of the US Capitol four years ago. In that very instant, however, we will cross into the realm of known unknowns. Trump will again become the most powerful figure on the planet that much is for certain. But it is hard to foresee precisely how he will wield that power.
If the president-elect’s words are to be taken at face value, then a global trade war is in the offing, not just with China but with all of America’s trading partners. Describing them as “the greatest thing ever invented”, Trump has threatened 60 per cent tariffs against China, and 10 to 20 per cent tariffs against all other countries. Mexico he has threatened with 100 per cent penalties.
Protectionism is one policy area where Trump has been ideologically consistent for decades, reaching back to the 1980s when Japan, rather than China, posed a threat to US economic hegemony.
Other countries have been ripping off Uncle Sam for decades, he has long believed, by running trade surpluses with the US. So on tariffs, real determination lies behind his words. Proof of that came on his first day in office in 2017, when he instantly withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership (TPP), which President Barack Obama had negotiated with other Asia-Pacific countries to contain China. It marked the start of a new protectionist age.
Trump’s tariffs, which he does not need congressional approval to impose, affect us all.
Last year, a report from the OECD weighing the effects of a global trade war projected it would cause a 10 per cent reduction of trade across all sectors. It also warned Australia could be hit by the second-largest national income fall in the world, with only South Korea worse hit. Australian output could fall by $30 billion, or 1.2 per cent of GDP, which given the country’s anaemic economic growth could tip it into recession. The mining, agriculture and metals sectors would be particularly hard hit.
It would come as no surprise, however, if the trade war does not turn out to be as intense or expansive as Trump’s rhetoric suggests. Originally, Robert Lighthizer, the former US trade chief, was tipped to become Trump’s field marshal in this mercantile tit-for-tat. But this longtime protectionist and China trade super hawk has been overlooked for the posts of Treasury secretary and Commerce secretary, the jobs he most coveted. For Treasury, Trump has picked the more Wall-Street friendly Scott Bessent, a hedge-fund billionaire whose nomination was opposed by strident protectionists within Trump’s orbit because he is not seen as sufficiently aggressive in applying universal tariffs. For Bessent, tariffs should be “layered in gradually,” and treated more like precision weapons than a blunderbuss.
That maybe music to the ears of financial institutions on Wall Street, which fear tariffs will lead to a spike in inflation and a reversal of the Federal Reserve’s recent relaxation of interest rates. But Trump could end up being influenced more by his incoming Commerce secretary, Howard Lutnik, the billionaire founder of financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, who will lead the tariff and trade agenda. At the Madison Square Garden Trump rally on the eve of the presidential election, Lutnik delivered an impassioned speech where he located American greatness at the turn 20th century. “We had no income tax,” he shouted, “and all we had was tariffs.”
Ultimately, the markets might act as a moderating influence. No modern-day president has had such a fixation with the stock market, and if shares head south as a result of the trade war — or even nosedive — Trump might rein himself in. He will be the president, but the markets may end up being king.
A lesson from the first term is that Trump’s bark is often worse than his bite, and that hardline stances are often pliable.
At the United Nations in 2017, during his first speech to the General Assembly, I watched him threaten to “totally destroy” North Korea, a member state, and mock its dictatorial leader, Kim Jong Un. “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and his regime,” he thundered. But just two years later, I was travelling with Trump on the Korean Peninsula when he embraced his new buddy, the self-same “Little Rocket Man”, in the DMZ buffer zone, an impromptu summit set up with an early morning tweet which gave it the feel of online dating. Quickly he went from threatening “fire and fury” to a firm and almost flirtatious friendship.
Nor, despite his bellicose rhetoric and sabre rattling, is Trump an impulsive warmonger. During his first term, he was prepared to take military action, by ordering the assassination of Iran’s most senior general, Qasem Soleimani. Early in his presidency, he also authorised air strikes in Syria, to punish its then president, Bashar al-Assad, for using nerve agents against his own people.
Crucially, however, Trump did not start any new wars, and he steered clear of military adventurism or mission creep in which a short-term operation becomes an unplanned long-term commitment. Far from being trigger-happy, in many ways he inverted President Theodore Roosevelt’s famed dictum “speak softly and carry a big stick.” Trump conducted megaphone diplomacy but rarely reached for a cane. Watch what he does rather than listen to what he says is the advice from the former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison and former UK prime minister Boris Johnson, who worked with him closely.
That said, Trump frequently does precisely what he says he will do. Indeed, one way he has sought to differentiate himself from conventional politicians is to make good on campaign promises.
Running for the presidency in 2016, he pledged to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord and did just that — making his announcement from the Rose Garden of the White House on such a scorching day in June 2017 that both my phone and laptop overheated. Likewise, he withdrew the US from the Iranian nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration. In the Middle East, Trump promised to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which happened with great fanfare in May 2018. His pronouncements on foreign affairs need to be taken both seriously and literally.
This time he has claimed he will end the war in Ukraine “in 24 hours”, which suggests a land-for-peace deal between Kyiv and Moscow that would reward Vladimir Putin with the territory presently occupied by Russian forces. Given that Russian forces are slowly advancing, public support in Ukraine for the conflict is waning, and continued resistance is contingent on US aid which Trump has threatened to reduce, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is open to some kind of deal. But Ukraine would want effective security guarantees from the US and the west, such as the promise of future NATO membership, which Putin would likely balk at, and which Trump might not even offer. Given these stumbling blocks, the war will not be brought to an end in 24 hours.
Close attention will be paid to what happens in Ukraine because of its knock-on effects for Taiwan, another geopolitical flashpoint. Back in 2016, Taipei was joyous when, after his shock victory, president-elect Trump accepted a call from the then Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen — a dramatic gesture since the United States does not formally recognise Taiwan as a country. Now, though, Taiwan is looking trepidatiously on his return, after Trump’s comments during the campaign that it should devote 10 per cent of its GDP towards defence (the US spends 3 per cent of its GDP on its armed forces), and that it was “stealing” America’s semi-conductor industry.
Taipei is understandably concerned that the US commitment to its defence will no longer be as strong, and that Trump’s “America First” foreign policy will primarily be transactional rather than values based. Yet it will draw some comfort from the fact that he has picked China hawks for the top diplomatic posts in his administration. Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida set to become Secretary of State, was the author in 2023 of the Taiwan Peace Through Strength Act, which proposed increased coordination between the US and Taiwanese military, and technology transfers to bolster Taiwan’s defences. Congressman Mike Waltz, the former Green Beret who Trump has made his national security advisor, is another China hawk with sharp talons. In 2021, Waltz, a member of the bipartisan Taiwan caucus on Capitol Hill, proposed the Taiwan Defence Act, with the aim “to maintain the ability of the US Armed Forces to defeat attempts by China to invade and seize control of Taiwan”.
The staffing of Trump’s foreign policy team is worth dwelling on, not least because these have been his most conventional appointments. Alongside Rubio at the State Department and Waltz heading up the National Security Council in the White House will be the New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik, his pick for the US permanent representative to the United Nations. After graduating from Harvard, Stefanik joined the Bush administration and launched her electoral career in 2014 as a moderate conservative. All three have become Trump loyalists, but all three would have felt at home in previous Republican administrations, which cannot be said of the president-elect’s more outlandish picks. Certainly, more Trumpian options were available. Before the election, the former diplomat and intelligence chief Richard Grenell was tipped to become secretary of state. Grenell is far more of an America Firster.
To the Middle East, Trump has blithely promised to bring “lasting peace” — which is very much in keeping with his habit of simplifying the most complex and intractable of problems.
Yet there are hopes he could reduce the present bloodshed by exerting more influence than Joe Biden on Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “I think he knows I want it to end,” Trump told Time magazine before Christmas, when asked about the war in Gaza. At times the two have had a fractious relationship, especially after the Israeli prime minister congratulated Joe Biden on his victory in 2020, while Trump was still disputing the result. But Netanyahu is more likely to listen to the incoming than the outgoing US president.
Further afield in the Middle East, Trump will almost certainly look to build upon the most notable diplomatic achievement of his first term in office, the signing of the Abraham Accords which normalised relations between Israel and two of its Arab neighbours, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Trump covets a Nobel peace prize, and it rankles that Barack Obama was awarded this honour less than eight months into his presidency ostensibly for becoming the first Black occupant of the White House. So, with his legacy in mind, ideally, he would like to orchestrate an even more momentous accord between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Riyadh, however, would demand as part of the deal the creation of an independent Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital, something which Trump has stopped short of explicitly backing. Nor is Marco Rubio in favour of the two-state solution, what most western powers regard as the sine qua non, the precondition, for lasting peace.
Following the unexpectedly rapid fall of the Assad regime, the entire region is in a state of flux. Even before the lightning events in Damascus, Iran had watched the collapse of its “axis of resistance” after the decimation of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Trump’s intentions towards Iran are from clear and could well be impacted by an alleged Iranian plot uncovered by the FBI to assassinate him during the presidential campaign. But while some reports hint at a return to the “maximum pressure” approach adopted during his first administration, there have also been signs of a softening. In November, Elon Musk met Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations as part of an attempt to defuse tensions between the two countries.
As his withdrawal in 2018 from the six-nation Iranian nuclear deal underscored, Trump’s brand of “America First” hyper-unilateralism brings into question the immediate future of multilateralism. Trump has promised to withdraw the US — again — from the UN Framework Committee on climate change. He is set to withdraw the US — again — from the UN Human Rights Council. The United Nations Secretary General António Guterres could well end up spending the final two years of his tenure fretting that Trump could kill off the world governing body “with a single tweet”, as he once told me during Trump 1.0. As things turned out, Guterres proved adept at dealing with Trump and forged a strong partnership with Trump’s then UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, who understood the body’s worth as well as its foibles. Guterres — who in media interviews made a point, Voldemort-like, of never mentioning Trump by no name, out of fear of enflaming him — will doubtless seek the same kind of partnership with Stefanik.
One area in which 2025 could see a burst of multilateralism is artificial intelligence. In February, governments and tech companies will meet at the AI Action Summit in Paris. Canada, the host of this year’s G7 summit, is making AI a main focus, in the hope of nurturing greater international cooperation on the question of global governance. From February, prohibitions on certain AI systems covered by the European Union AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive attempt at regulation, will come into effect.
After the year of democracy in 2024, when elections were held in more than 70 countries directly impacting more than half of the world’s population, the 2025 democratic dance card looks pretty empty by comparison. The most noteworthy election will come in Germany in February, where polls suggest the conservative Christian Democratic Union, and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, is headed for victory after just three years in opposition. Much of the attention will focus on the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD), which polling suggests is running ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). But Scholz will almost certainly be superseded as chancellor by the 68-year-old leader of the Christian Democratic Union, Friedrich Merz.
Parliamentary elections are not as yet scheduled in France, but they will almost certainly have to be called to break the deadlock in the National Assembly, where the first successful no confidence vote since the early 1960s led to the ouster in December of the prime minister, Michel Barnier. The European Union’s two major powers are both experiencing a period of political turmoil. The Franco-German axis, the spine of mainland Europe, is looking shaky.
Aside from Germany and possibly France, the most eye-catching electoral contests will come in Australia and Canada. Both will provide a test of whether progressive-minded parties can retain power at a time when the centre of political gravity is shifting rightward. Justin Trudeau is seeking to extend his run as the G7′s longest serving leader in the year that Canada hosts the G7 summit. But it is hard to foresee his Liberal Party winning a fourth consecutive mandate.
Here in Australia, Anthony Albanese will struggle to defend his three-seat majority, although he could end up leading a minority government. Peter Dutton is aiming to dislodge Labor after just one term in power, partly by making the Liberals more of a populist party and adopting elements of Trump’s political field guide — another measure of the president-elect’s global influence.
My hunch is that Trump wanted to win the presidential election more than the presidency itself, partly as a score-settling exercise and partly out of his desire to stay out of prison. There were times during the campaign when I wondered whether his heart was truly in it. Certainly, he did not repeat the punishing stadium rally schedule that was such a marked feature of his 2016 campaign.
A lot will depend on the energy levels of a 78-year-old who has become the oldest candidate ever elected president — beating Joe Biden by five months. World-altering questions could turn on how he apportions his time between the Oval Office and his beloved fairways and greens.
Golf is often called the world’s most unpredictable sport. It is a fitting pastime for America’s most unpredictable president.
Credits
Words: Nick Bryant
Editing and production: Leigh Tonkin and Catherine Taylor
Graphic images: Lindsay Dunbar
Odyssey format by ABC News Story Lab
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