Here are the surprises 2025 could hold.
(Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)
New Year’s columns are lugubrious but inevitable. Little ever happens in the dead week between Christmas and January 1, so your humble correspondents resort to silly lists of confidently made wrong predictions and coy dodges to fill their inches. Last year, the late Mr. Houthi’s namesake group in Yemen bestirred itself to lob some missiles and drones at Red Sea traffic, which was good for some copy, but this year Western powers are barely contesting that sea lane—no news there. So we resort to the New Year’s column. It’s an exercise in humility; it gives you people something to beat me up about this time next year. Here are some things that I think will happen; more interestingly, here are some things that I think could produce unexpected scenarios in Year of Grace 2025.
The Trump coalition and legacy. As our contributing editor Ryan Girdusky would have it, Trump has built a governing majority, if he (and the GOP) can keep it. So far, he seems to be playing for keeps, balancing the interests of his working-class core and those of his tech-billionaire backers, for better or worse. Can he keep the show running? Can he bully his ever unruly and incompetent legislative entourage into advancing the agenda? An intimately related question is whether he can deliver on his concrete campaign promises—an end to the Russia–Ukraine war, disentanglement from the Middle East, and the consolidation of economic strength. Happenstance and ill intentions could conspire to derail his triumphal progress.
Trump, the man. Trump is 78 years old. While he is visibly haler and more capable than Biden was even in 2020, he is still an elderly man, and subject to the characteristic declines and chance evils of old age. A slippery porch step or an uncovered sneeze could radically change the political landscape in the next four years.
Latin America and the Caribbean. Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico seems ready to deal with Donald Trump, but there are plenty of possible disruptions brewing to her south and east. Cuba is undergoing an acute, possibly irreversible energy crisis. Venezuela’s Maduro is still throwing himself with great enthusiasm into massive political repression, which is exacerbating the communist state’s population hemorrhage. Ecuador is collapsing. Colombia is in the midst of a political crisis. Haiti is still a violent basket-case. Any of these Western Hemisphere situations could become a problem for America by feeding mass migration, constricting trade, or providing an opportunity for near-peer rivals (and I mean China) to step in.
Ukraine. Here is a single, concrete, no-frills prediction: There will be a ceasefire in Ukraine by the end of 2025. If I am wrong about that, feel free to email abuse to me, and I will email back, with meek feeling, “Thank you, sir, may I have another.” That’s a bet. If I lose this bet, however, there are a host of unexpected, mostly very bad things that could happen, several of them involving thermonuclear weapons. It does not bear meditating on it.
Subscribe Today Get daily emails in your inbox Email Address:
The Middle East. The collapse of Syria has suddenly clarified that Turkey is a major player in the Middle East and Muslim Central Asia. It has also given Israel a cleaner route for striking Iran, if that nation is so inclined. Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan has proven politically and diplomatically flexible, to say the least; look for unexpected combinations among the major players, particularly as the U.S. tries to navigate the current natural tensions between the NATO ally Turkey and its usual regional proxy Israel. (Also, it is always worth saying that Egypt is very fragile and very large, and could turn into a mess overnight.) Inexplicably, some thousands of American troops are still in Syria; if Trump cannot take them out, we seem inevitably committed to distractions in the sandbox. (Carter is dead; maybe it’s time to bury his doctrine, too.)
Religious turmoil. The three crowned heads who preside over the greater part of the Christian peoples are all gravely aged: Pope Francis is 88; Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople is 84; Patriarch Kirill of Moscow is 78. The death of one or more of them, while unlikely to set off any medieval-style reconfigurations of the secular order, will have widespread cultural importance, particularly depending on the successors. (My own money is down for the likeliest outcome at Rome.) While there are no reasons to believe that any of them is in imminent danger—I heard the same well-sourced rumors everyone else did about Francis’s cancer in 2022, and the man has proved indestructible—the bit about the chances of age still applies. The two Orthodox figures particularly would be leaving a very messy scene dominated by the U.S. State Department (and co.) meddling in Ukraine’s religious politics. A sudden crisis in Orthodoxy could cause strange distortions to the peace process in Ukraine.
As always, thank you for reading The American Conservative, and I look forward to spending another year with you. Drop us a line if you feel like it, and, if you haven’t already, please subscribe. Happy New Year.
Sourse: theamericanconservative.com
