{"id":204349,"date":"2025-12-26T04:36:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-26T04:36:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/204349\/"},"modified":"2025-12-26T04:36:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-26T04:36:10","slug":"2025-a-year-of-chaos-and-confusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/204349\/","title":{"rendered":"2025 \u2014 a year of chaos and confusion"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review<\/a> podcast episode: \u20182025 \u2014 a year of chaos and confusion<\/a>\u2019<\/p>\n

Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I\u2019m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week\u2019s podcast is a recording of an FT Live event from earlier in December, in which we look back at 2025 and forward to the big political trends that will shape the world in the coming year.<\/p>\n

I was joined by three of my favourite geopolitical commentators: Leslie Vinjamuri is president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs; Daniel Drezner, professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University in Boston; and James Crabtree is author of an acclaimed book on Modi\u2019s India and a forthcoming book on US-China tensions in the Pacific. So amid all the turmoil of the first year of the second Trump presidency, what are the big trends we should be looking out for?<\/p>\n

[MUSIC PLAYING]<\/p>\n

Donald Trump voice clip
I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States. So help me God. <\/p>\n

Unknown speaker
Congratulations, Mr President. (Applause)<\/p>\n

Gideon Rachman
That was, of course, Donald Trump being sworn in earlier this year for his second term as US president. There\u2019s no doubt that Trump has set the tone of world politics this year, from his tariff wars to his efforts to make peace in the Middle East and Ukraine, while also bombing Iran and threatening Venezuela. <\/p>\n

News clip
Now, President Trump has said that the next steps in this campaign will be US air strikes on land in Venezuela.<\/p>\n

Gideon Rachman
So how do we make sense of the apparent chaos? I started the conversation by asking each of my guests to come up with a single theme or event that they would pick out from the last year. Daniel Drezner first. <\/p>\n

Dan Drezner
As someone who, you know, teaches about the global political economy and US foreign economic policy, I\u2019m gonna stick to my sort of home soil and say it was the announcement of the \u201cliberation day\u201d tariffs \u2014 that \u201cliberation day\u201d should be put in quotes \u2014 that were made in April, in which Trump basically jacked up the average tariff rate in the United States to something on the order of 20 per cent. But it\u2019s not just the tariffs themselves, it was the whole pageantry of the thing, for lack of a better way of putting it.<\/p>\n

The fact that we applied tariffs on islands that did not in fact export anything to the United States. I believed among others we tariffed Diego Garcia, which includes a US military base. So we were technically putting a tariff on the US military. And then the fact that a week later the tariffs were suddenly paused during which, you know, Scott Bessent, who was the Treasury secretary, claimed it was an example of the art of the deal in the making. And then Trump was asked why he did it and he admitted it was because the bond markets had freaked out. <\/p>\n

I think it was emblematic of Trump\u2019s willingness to basically do anything in a unilateral and sort of quick-fix way. The president has significant authority to raise tariffs for a variety of reasons, but Trump chose to use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which it turns out seems increasingly likely the Supreme Court will strike down because it was the first time that the president had used that authority to try to raise tariffs rather than just restrict trade.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s emblematic in some ways as Trump\u2019s slapdash approach to how he sees the world. But I think the fact that he\u2019s done it and that as a result US tariff rates are now higher than at any point during the post-cold war era, and then you have at least some countries trying to cut deals of some kind or another, demonstrates the degree to which the liberal international order, which has been a phrase that has been bandied about for the last decade, turns out not to have rested so much on rules but on norms.<\/p>\n

Gideon Rachman
Leslie, you were based here in London till quite recently. You\u2019re now in the States following global affairs and US foreign policy. For you, what was the big moment? <\/p>\n

Leslie Vinjamuri
There\u2019s so many big moments, Gideon, but I think for me, really it would have to be the inaugural speech when President Trump, you know, we\u2019re sort of all waiting for it \u2014 China, the pacing threat \u2014 and we didn\u2019t get that. What we got was Canada should be the 51st state and we\u2019re gonna focus on the western hemisphere. It was a signal that these eight decades where America has been deeply committed to allies, you know, committing to the liberal international order, gone. <\/p>\n

When you start taking Canada as your first whipping boy in your inaugural speech, it was a very clear signal that those long-standing deep, multi-layered relationships just simply don\u2019t and didn\u2019t matter to this US president, and it was the beginning of Donald Trump sort of coming at almost with a visceral antipathy towards America\u2019s closest partners in Europe and Canada and elsewhere, more so than our long-standing adversaries in Russia and China and so on. So I think it was really that inauguration speech when people\u2019s jaws dropped. It was really a stunning and shocking reversal of fortunes for many of America\u2019s allies. <\/p>\n

Gideon Rachman
James, you\u2019re writing a book at the moment on the Asia Pacific area. So with that kind of hat or lens on \u2014 hat and lens, why not both \u2014 what do you think was most striking for you? <\/p>\n

James Crabtree
I think the thing that really stands out is the complete role reversal of America\u2019s relationship with the two Asian giants, China and India.<\/p>\n

When Trump came in, many people predicted this would herald a very sharp deterioration in relations between Washington and Beijing. But actually as the year goes on, it becomes clearer and clearer that this is a period of if not rapprochement then improving ties between Washington and Beijing, culminating in his tweet at the Apec summit about the convening of the G2 in anticipation of his meeting that we think is likely to happen in Beijing next year.<\/p>\n

By contrast, we all thought that US-India relations were on a long-term upswing after a decade, maybe two decades of closer ties. And yet Trump hit the Indians with 20 per cent tariffs, then 20 per cent more tariffs, got entangled in a spat over his role in the military confrontation between India and Pakistan. And so at the end of the year, you have US-China relations in the best position that they\u2019ve been in for a long time and US-India relations in the worst position they\u2019ve been in probably for 20 years. I don\u2019t think anybody saw that coming. <\/p>\n

Gideon Rachman
Absolutely. Just a quick follow-up before I come back on trade. How much of that deterioration in the relationship with India is associated with Trump\u2019s own rather quixotic effort to win the Nobel Peace Prize? Because I think that gets to a bigger point, which is that so much of what\u2019s happening seems to be driven by Trump\u2019s whims, by his personality. Was it really because the Indians wouldn\u2019t nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize? <\/p>\n

James Crabtree
I think we\u2019d need to take Trump\u2019s aspiration to win the Peace Prize very seriously as a sort of driver of American policy. In the Indian case, I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s the Peace Prize directly, but basically he feels personally slighted that India didn\u2019t give him due credit for the role that he thinks that he played in bringing to a conclusion the short military engagement between India and Pakistan a few months ago. So I think it is a big part of that. There are other factors in play, but I think this is an administration that is run along court politics lines, and it reflects the whims of the king. And if the king is annoyed with you, as he does seem to be with India and Prime Minister Modi at the moment, then that can have very dramatic geopolitical consequences. <\/p>\n

Gideon Rachman
OK, Dan, let\u2019s get back to trade because I think we talk about Trump\u2019s whims, but this is one thing on which he\u2019s been very consistent. He\u2019s been a protectionist his whole life, and you mentioned that he backed off after a week, but then he came back. And then the second round of tariffs seem not to provoke the bond markets in quite the same way. So it\u2019s six months since they revised the tariffs. What effects can we see? How bad has it been for the world economy? And are we beginning to see inflation rise in America as conventional economists predicted it would?<\/p>\n

Dan Drezner
Inflation has risen over the past year. It was down to I think 2.5 or 2.7 per cent on inauguration day. It\u2019s now over 3 per cent, and that\u2019s before US producers, US importers have passed on much of the price, and I think part of the reason the inflation has been a little more muted than folks expected is that because everyone anticipated that Trump was gonna raise tariffs I think you saw a lot of surge-buying before \u201cliberation day\u201d or before the tariffs came on in the anticipation that people needed to stockpile.<\/p>\n

I think the effect on the global economy has been mostly negative but it hasn\u2019t caused a calamity. The United States has actually not done terribly well as a result of the tariffs, but that\u2019s been masked by the fact that we\u2019ve also been in the middle of the largest investment boom in quite some time due to AI and particularly the performance of the Mag Seven.<\/p>\n

And so from the American perspective, you know, you still see equity markets doing pretty well. You still see the economy in positive shape. There are people complaining about affordability and if you take a look at public opinion polls, Americans are not happy about the state of the economy. But I think they would be even more unhappy if they looked at how let\u2019s say US stock markets are doing compared to global equity markets, where yes, the US equity market is positive, but it\u2019s nowhere near close to how the rest of the world is doing.<\/p>\n

So the one way in which this might be a positive is that I think there were some fears that when Trump imposed these tariffs, it would then trigger a sort of global trade war. And that really hasn\u2019t happened. And even Trump has gone back on some of these things, like the deal that Nvidia just cut with the Chinese government to allow really high-end chips to be exported. So in some ways, the one consistent thing about this has been the complete lack of consistency. <\/p>\n

Gideon Rachman
OK. Leslie, it seems to me that one of the things about this year is the duality between Trump the peacemaker but also Trump\u2019s aggressive instincts where he says, we\u2019re gonna expand America\u2019s territory, and also is the first president to actually carry through on the threats to bomb Iran, albeit after Israel has kind of dragged him into the conflict. So how do you strike the balance between Trump being peacemaker and Trump the guy who\u2019s prepared to bomb Iran and make all these aggressive noises? <\/p>\n

Leslie Vinjamuri
OK, first, let me add one data point, if I may, on the tariffs, because it\u2019s a really interesting one. The Chicago Council where I now am, as you know, has been doing polling of Americans for five decades, and we polled Americans this year on their attitudes towards tariffs, and we polled them last year. Last year, 64 per cent of Americans thought that tariffs were somewhat or very effective in achieving US foreign policy goals \u2014 64 per cent. This year, 44 per cent. <\/p>\n

Gideon Rachman
Oh, interesting. <\/p>\n

Leslie Vinjamuri
It\u2019s dropped 20 per cent. The other thing to watch is how it\u2019s affecting rural interests in the US, which are key to Donald Trump\u2019s coalitions, farmers in particular.<\/p>\n

But on this question that you actually posed to me, it is an interesting duality, isn\u2019t it? On the one hand, you\u2019re sort of disrupting those relationships with the allies that have helped you to keep the world calm and stable to a degree. And on the other hand, you\u2019re sort of trying to do peace with the disrupters.<\/p>\n

Some of this is, I think, Donald Trump\u2019s own feelings about people. I think Donald Trump wasn\u2019t a particularly big fan of Justin Trudeau even though Trudeau was out and going out. I do think that that influenced his attitude towards Canada. He was also sending a signal to Canada, even to Mark Carney, that the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement is up for review and possible renegotiation and signalling with that, it\u2019s not going to be easy. What are you gonna give? <\/p>\n

On Europe, you know, we\u2019ve known for a long time. Getting peace in the conflicts that we\u2019re talking about is all part of sort of half grand strategy, which is reorienting the world towards great powers, dealing with each other on their own terms, devoid of any question of values, democracy, liberalism. And so pushing hard on Europe is, you know, come on, buck up. You are not the part of the world that actually really matters. Russia is, and the Ukraine problem needs to be solved in order to get that US-Russia relationship back to where he wants it to be. <\/p>\n

So in some ways, these things that seem counterintuitive to us, they\u2019re only really counterintuitive to us because we have the lens and the framework of the so-called liberal international order of eight decades. He just simply hasn\u2019t brought that to the table. If you have a different starting point, sorting things out in the Middle East so that you can focus on China, sorting things out in Ukraine so you can focus on Russia and kind of letting Europe and Canada fall by the wayside, it\u2019s not so hard to explain.<\/p>\n

Gideon Rachman
What do you think Trump sees as the endpoint of all this? I mean, is it driven by business? Because there does seem to be, you know, a lot of business deals on the table and perhaps it\u2019s quite astute of the Russians to put a former Goldman Sachs banker who speaks fluent English, Kirill Dmitriev, as their frontman because he kind of talks the same language as Witkoff and others. So is it a business thing? Is it this fear that Europe might drag America into war? Or is there maybe also a grand strategic thing going on about trying to detach Russia from China because they don\u2019t like the sort of condominium between those two countries.<\/p>\n

Leslie Vinjamuri
I mean, look, I think all of the above. But you know, one thing I would say is that we all know that most post-cold war US presidents have entered office wishing to reset America\u2019s relationship with Russia. So Trump\u2019s not really an outlier on that. He\u2019s an outlier only because when he entered office there was already a war in Ukraine, a war of aggression instigated by Russia. So it was surprising to us that he tries to reset the relationship in that context. <\/p>\n

But I do think he has a, you know, somewhat halfway strategic vision of international relations and in that, getting strategic stability, to use a language of the recently released national security strategy, getting that stability between the US and Russia is critical towards a broader balance-of-power politics. If it also means that he makes some money, absolutely a good thing. It\u2019s clearly also underpinned by the fact that he just, for whatever reason, we didn\u2019t understand it in his first administration, we don\u2019t understand it now, he likes this guy Vladimir Putin. <\/p>\n

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. And the other guy he likes, James, is Xi Jinping, who he\u2019s constantly saying is a great man and a strong leader and so on. So I\u2019d like your take on where you think things stand in US-China. I\u2019ll give you mine briefly first, which is that I think that, you know, the tariffs that Dan talked about, I think China was hit particularly hard on \u201cliberation day\u201d. But as the year has worn on, it\u2019s become, I think, apparent that China has a very strong hand, particularly through rare earths and critical minerals, and the US has had to back off. Is that how you see it? <\/p>\n

James Crabtree
Yeah, I think that\u2019s exactly right. If you think about it from President Xi\u2019s point of view, the first Trump administration was a wake-up call about the way that America could behave and the vulnerabilities that China had and therefore China, through its \u201cMade in 2025\u201d manufacturing process but in particular through a strategy known as dual circulation, began to look at ways in which the US could hurt China economically through interdependence and ways that China could potentially fight back. <\/p>\n

And what you\u2019ve seen this year, some eight years later, is that Chinese strategy has worked pretty well. America hit them with tariffs and semiconductor restrictions. China replied with rare earths restrictions and the US had to de-escalate. And now we\u2019re at a point where we have a temporary truce that will lead, we think, most likely in the new year to a kind of broader deal of some description that\u2019s most likely to be economic as opposed to have things about Taiwan in there, but most likely to buy a period of relative stability before the tectonic shifts of long-term competition bite back. And in the long term, I think the US and China are still set on a path of competition with one another. But you can have temporary lulls in that. And I think what Trump and Xi for their own reasons are doing at the moment is negotiating one of those temporary lulls.<\/p>\n

Gideon Rachman
Dan, is that how you see it, a temporary lull? Or might there be a kind of relationship in which America gives China more strategic space and tries to rebalance the economic relationship and some of the tensions are taken out of it? <\/p>\n

Dan Drezner
If there has been one through line in terms of the Trump administration\u2019s first term and its current term, it has been that Trump has been perfectly willing to trade off geopolitical bones of contention in the Asia Pacific for a better economic deal with China. Think about it in terms of saying he wasn\u2019t gonna criticise China\u2019s treatment of the Uyghurs when China cracked down in Xinjiang. He also refrained really from criticising China\u2019s crackdown in Hong Kong during that same period. It would not surprise me if Trump himself would personally decide, look, what I want is a rebalanced economic arrangement, and I don\u2019t care as much about Taiwan or anything else because it\u2019s an away game for the United States, so why can\u2019t we just get more money as a result? <\/p>\n

Now, the catch with Taiwan, of course, is that someone has presumably told him the US economy runs on semiconductors that are manufactured pretty much only in Taiwan, that while the US companies design those chips, they are still primarily manufactured in Taiwan. Now, someone might also then tell him, well, the US is building foundries and so pretty soon we won\u2019t necessarily need to worry about that. There\u2019s a variety of reasons to be somewhat sceptical of that, but the thing to realise about Trump increasingly this term is that it\u2019s sometimes a mistake to assume that the reason the US is doing something in terms of foreign policy is because he wants to. It can often be that he\u2019s doing something because he doesn\u2019t care and someone under him cares very much about it. <\/p>\n

So, for example, if you\u2019re asking: why is Trump doing what he\u2019s doing in the Caribbean and in Venezuela? Yeah, there\u2019s a way in which it\u2019s in accord with Trump\u2019s general interest of having a sphere of influence and being concerned about inflows of drugs and immigrants. But this is about Marco Rubio and Steve Miller, but particularly Rubio. The only intellectual through line of Marco Rubio from the neoconservative version of him in 2014 to the \u201cAmerica First\u201d version now has been his hawkishness on Latin America. And so it\u2019s unsurprising that you are seeing what\u2019s going on in terms of US sort of bellicosity in that region. <\/p>\n

Gideon Rachman
Do you think one could say: well, America\u2019s demographics are shifting. So is it almost natural that America, as its demography changes and becomes less of a society with European forebears, might look more towards the western hemisphere and less towards Europe?<\/p>\n

Dan Drezner
I mean, bear in mind that the Trump coalition is not keen about that shift in demographics. In fact, they are trying to fight it as much as humanly possible. Take a look at the US national security strategy. It is all about promoting US birth rates and really, the only demonstration of any discipline for that strategy document is that the word white doesn\u2019t appear in it, because that\u2019s clearly what\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. I mean, priority one: stop mass migration. <\/p>\n

Dan Drezner
Yeah, stop mass migration. Exactly. But you\u2019re right that if you were gonna put an intellectual patina on what Trump is doing, it is a sort of spheres of influence kind of world as far as he\u2019s concerned. He thinks that powerful actors matter and less powerful actors don\u2019t. And in his mind, the powerful actors are China and Russia. Now, as someone who studies power and studies international relations, I would have some vigorous contestation about whether you think Russia is really as powerful as he says it is, but in his mind, that\u2019s what matters. <\/p>\n

And the other thing that I think also matters is his almost 19th-century conception of what the drivers of power are, which are territory and industrial might. And here I will give him 10 per cent credit. He is correct to be concerned about the degree to which China is going to be a manufacturing almost monopoly going forward. I think one of your colleagues at the FT pointed out last month that China doesn\u2019t seem really interested in importing from anyone else. They just wanna export to everyone. And I think the OECD estimates that by 2030, China\u2019s manufacturing capacity will be roughly half of global capacity. And this creates imbalances that lead to problematic reactions like Trump, but also should lead to more sober responses from the rest of the world.<\/p>\n

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. I mean, Leslie, we talked about his attitudes to Russia, to China, but his attitudes to the allies are pretty extraordinary. Dan was talking about the national security strategy. Were you surprised by the kind of, I wouldn\u2019t say it\u2019s open antagonism, so sort of cultural despair about Europe. They say we are sentimentally attached to Europe for the kind of almost racial reasons that Dan was referring to, but the Europeans are committing civilisational erasure, and so for those reasons, Trump seems to be, or the people around him, at least in theory, willing to give up on the current set of European governments and hope that a new set of far-right governments come to power. Is that how you read it? <\/p>\n

Leslie Vinjamuri
I was at the Doha Forum when that was released, along with many other Europeans, not that many Americans, although Donald Trump Jr was there as was Tucker Carlson. Shocked, for sure. Not surprised. You know, first thing to say, it\u2019s just phenomenally patronising to have this US administration speaking to its long-standing European allies, wealthy democratic countries, and holding up the international order. It\u2019s just shockingly insulting and patronising. But when you move past that, it\u2019s dangerous. This is an administration that suggests that it wants to focus on sovereignty and not values across the globe, now is going completely deep in on the values debate, but on the other side.<\/p>\n

Gideon Rachman
Saying they\u2019re gonna check the social media profiles of people applying for American visas.<\/p>\n

Leslie Vinjamuri
And today we hear, right, that even if you\u2019re coming from the United Kingdom, they\u2019re gonna go back through many years of your social media engagement and public statements. I mean, who\u2019s gonna make it into the US? But I think this is the part of the national security strategy that reads very much as JD Vance Munich 2025 repeat.<\/p>\n

But it suggests that if there\u2019s going to be a transatlantic partnership, it\u2019s one that should be reforged along lines of family values. You know, they\u2019re not gonna say it, but white nationalism and pro-far right anti-immigrant populist nationalist parties. It was the most subversive and unsettling part of the national security strategy.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, one sort of wonders, you know, is it really gonna stick? This is gonna come down to Europe, not to Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

Gideon Rachman
James, I wanted to ask you about Asian allies because the year\u2019s ending with a pretty tense confrontation between Japan, the new Japanese prime minister, and China over Taiwan. And I gather, according to excellent reporting in the FT, that the Japanese are not 100 per cent happy by the rhetorical support or lack of it from the United States.<\/p>\n

James Crabtree
I think it\u2019s been a rollercoaster year for the US allies, so Australia, Japan, South Korea, Philippines, in particular. For most of the year, the relationships were as bad as they\u2019ve been in the last decade because of the \u201cliberation day\u201d tariffs. I mean, particularly Japan and Korea were really shocked that they, as model allies, were going to get treated in this cavalier, unthoughtful way.<\/p>\n

I think, to be fair to him, President Trump has repaired a little bit of that damage in the second half of the year. So for Australia, Prime Minister Albanese had a visit that everyone was delighted with. A month or so ago, they struck a big critical raw materials deal. Trump and Takaichi met in Tokyo. Takaichi handed over a box of golden golf balls. He seemed to be very pleased with that. The meeting with the South Koreans at the Apec summit also seemed to go well. So I think a little bit of that damage has been undone. The allies of America are always nervous about American perfidity and abandonment, but I think at the moment they\u2019re particularly nervous and with very good reason.<\/p>\n

As in that tweet I mentioned earlier, the G2 tweet, we know the Chinese are interested in a world in which, you know, the world\u2019s issues are divided between themselves and America. They call it a new model of great power relations. They tried this on with Obama at the end of his second term, and eventually he decided that it wasn\u2019t worth doing, very sensibly. And so they\u2019re keen on this, and if America is also keen on this and acts in that way, then that leaves the US allies and partners really out on a limb because they don\u2019t have a plan B. It isn\u2019t like Europe and Russia where in theory, at least the Europeans, if they get their act together, can handle the Russians on their own.<\/p>\n

The Japanese and the Koreans can\u2019t handle the Chinese on their own. I mean, it\u2019s just not possible. So there\u2019s no strategic balance in the Indo-Pacific without America. And so the way that Trump\u2019s behaving is leaving them very nervous indeed. And they\u2019ll be watching very carefully to see exactly what happens between China and the United States in the meeting that\u2019s due to happen in the spring, and in particular what will happen with Taiwan and whether Trump begins to trade away Taiwanese security for economic benefits. It\u2019s pretty clear he doesn\u2019t really care about Taiwan as he doesn\u2019t care about Ukraine, and the question is, will he act on that impulse or not? <\/p>\n

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. Which brings us very nicely to predictions for the year ahead. So I\u2019ll ask all three of you, if you look ahead to 2026, what are you gonna be looking out for? Dan first. <\/p>\n

Dan Drezner
I think I\u2019ll be looking for two things. The first is whether the AI bubble actually pops. We\u2019re now at the phase where I think everyone does really recognise there\u2019s been massive over-investment, and while I don\u2019t mean therefore to rubbish the utility of AI, some of the structured economic deals that you\u2019re seeing the AI producers create with others, like let\u2019s say Oracle, don\u2019t seem sustainable. And so if that bubble pops, what is the wider effect on the global economy? Does it create larger ramifications, or is it like the dotcom bubble of 2000, 2001, which was not minimal but also not in the end terribly systemic in terms of its negative effects?<\/p>\n

The other thing, if Trump is all about pageantry, I am legit curious how the World Cup goes off in the United States. There are potentially a lot of people who are supposed to be coming from the rest of the world. The whole world follows this sport, in some ways far more keenly than Americans. And I am curious the degree to which there are gonna be incidents and\/or, you know, possible moments of violence at these things and to what extent does Trump try to prevent this by, let\u2019s say, putting the National Guard out again in places where there are games going on. <\/p>\n

Gideon Rachman
Well, as a serial goer to World Cups, I\u2019m also curious and I would say actually, the most welcoming I\u2019ve ever seen Russia was in the 2018 World Cup when, you know, interestingly, the security-obsessed Russians allowed anyone with a ticket just to wave it at the border, and they let you in, which I don\u2019t think the United States is gonna do.<\/p>\n

So, Leslie, year ahead, what are you looking out for? <\/p>\n

Leslie Vinjamuri
Yeah, this is perhaps the highest stakes year for the United States in eight decades. I\u2019m glad that Dan talked about the World Cup. It\u2019s the 250th birthday of the United States. It\u2019s the year of US G20 leadership, but it\u2019s a year of midterm elections. It\u2019s a year where I think everybody\u2019s waiting to see how far does Donald Trump push the line when it comes to the rule of law and the norms that shore up the rule of law? How far is he gonna push it and how far is everybody else gonna push back? I think the world, and especially Americans, were very surprised at how far Donald Trump was willing to go in the first quarter of his leadership and how unhappy Americans were, but basically silent.<\/p>\n

Now, we\u2019re seeing, you know, a few more people on the streets. We\u2019re still seeing major universities make pretty big concessions and strike deals, Northwestern being one of the most recent. But as we get to those midterms in November, will Democrats take the House? If they do, what will they do with that oversight authority? <\/p>\n

You know, all the kind of big democracy questions are really on the table in the year ahead, and that I think will tell us a lot about the future of the United States. And the United States is the bellwether, it sets the bar for democracy globally. You know, the bar has come down but I think that Americans will have a lot of choices to make and it\u2019s gonna unfold in a variety of I think largely unpredictable and unforecastable ways.<\/p>\n

Gideon Rachman
Yes, that I think is probably a safe prediction with Trump in the White House. It\u2019ll be unpredictable. James, can you finish this off and also can you have a go at a question that\u2019s come from one of the audience, which is: do we think the Russia-Ukraine war will come to an end? Will there be a peace deal in the coming year?<\/p>\n

James Crabtree
So the thing that I\u2019m looking at most closely will be in this Trump-Xi meeting, and I think the real question is to what extent does the deal that gets done involve anything to do with Taiwanese security? It\u2019s not implausible that you could have some trading away of Taiwan’s security status in a way that would be extremely damaging to the Indo-Pacific architecture and the kind of long-term position of the US allies and partners. So I think if I was in Taipei, I\u2019d be pretty worried, and there are certainly people within the US administration who are worried about that. <\/p>\n

One other thing that I\u2019d look forward to is the vote for a new UN general secretary. In a funny way, the role of the US with these multilateral institutions is now partially benign neglect and ignoring it. But then occasionally it decides it\u2019s gonna put its finger on the scales. And this could be one of those times where the US has already hinted that it\u2019s looking for a Maga-aligned candidate to take over at the UN. And that could turn out to be a really interesting example of the US interfering in systems that are not very well disposed towards Trump.<\/p>\n

As to Ukraine, it really does depend the extent to which Trump forces Zelenskyy to say yes. The Russians are quite happy to fight on, and I think ideally the Ukrainians would fight on as opposed to accepting the deal that is currently being offered. However, if Trump makes it impossible for Ukraine to fight on, then they may have to fold, which would be a moral tragedy, but that is more likely to be the direction that we\u2019re heading in.<\/p>\n

[MUSIC PLAYING]<\/p>\n

Gideon Rachman
That was James Crabtree ending this year-end edition of the Rachman Review. You also heard from Daniel Drezner and Leslie Vinjamuri . Thanks for listening and please join me again in 2026 for another year of Rachman Reviews.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: \u20182025 \u2014 a year of chaos and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":204350,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-204349","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204349\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/204350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}