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Wherever I’ve gone overseas this past year, I’ve gotten mild whiplash. I think 2025 will bring a lot worse.
On the one hand, the world is full of peril. We’re heading into a year where a global conflict, already playing out in the shadows, could flare into the open.
Yet there’s something as stark that I came across everywhere: a sense of unprecedented opportunity, of forces of scientific and AI-driven technological innovation that are remaking the world for the better too. What’s also part of the whiplash? As much as Americans and others talk the place down, there is a desire, unpopular as that might be to say these days, especially in Trump world, for American leadership.
In 2024, a majority of voters in the democratic world cast their ballots. Incumbents fared badly in most. Domestic political maps were remade in Mexico, South Africa and India, in the U.K., France and European Union, in Japan and with Donald Trump’s return in America. The authoritarian trio of China, Russia and Iran were spared the voters but were buffeted by other events.
The next year will be shaped by, more than anything, how Trump interacts with this changed world. As never quite this way before, Washington is central to almost everything. In 2017, Trump came in as an outsider and governed as an insecure one. His second administration arrives in the capital with a clearer mandate and more confidence and bluster. Trump and his band, with Elon Musk at his side, are claiming they’ll disrupt our politics and government but also commerce, culture and of course, the world as a whole.
Some Trumpian framing can help judge their performance overseas: How successful they are in remaking it for the better depends on whether America will be seen — by friends, allies and fence-sitters like Brazil or South Africa — as strong or weak.
Adversaries are saying that America is a fading power and trying to convince others of that. “The East is rising,” China’s Xi Jinping likes to repeat, “while the West is declining.” To his own people, Vladimir Putin insists Russia can defeat the decadent, fickle Americans on the battlefield in Ukraine and reclaim its sphere of influence in eastern Europe.
In private, those men know that China and Russia are both relatively weaker at year’s end. China’s share of the global GDP went into reverse in 2021, as strong-growing America’s continues to go up, and China’s economy remains stalled. No one talks seriously about China overtaking the U.S. economically anymore. If demographics are destiny, China’s look worrying for Beijing: Its population is in decline, and last year it was overtaken as the world’s largest country by India, whose population is going up. Russia’s economy is sputtering as well, lending credence to estimates within NATO that Moscow won’t be able to sustain the Ukraine war beyond 2026.
Their weakness makes these two countries potentially more dangerous. They know they are vulnerable and need to keep up appearances. Their domestic legitimacy and sway abroad depends on it. Foreign adventures looked tempting to Putin, leading him into Ukraine and possibly beyond, and might to Xi as well as he eyes Taiwan. The third member of this autocratic trio — Iran — has the most reason to feel paranoid. Tehran lost its most important proxies in the Middle East in a matter of weeks, after Israel decimated Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon and its ally Bashar al-Assad was toppled in Syria.
The best response to the weakness of the autocrats, and the one that they best will understand, is American strength. They will bluster, but Putin, Xi and even the clerics in Iran care most about the survival of their regimes and have a finely tuned sense for America’s seriousness and mettle. Russian sallies into the Baltics or Poland and China into Taiwan are less likely if they believe the U.S. will come down in potentially fatal ways on them.
Trump doesn’t have to bluster himself. The U.S. ends the year in a better place than it began it. The economy is the “envy of the world’s,” per the Economist, notching up the highest growth and lowest inflation among the G7 countries. Our leadership in finance and AI is unchallenged. Our universities are the magnets for the world’s brightest. Even our politics, if not quite functional (as Congress reminds the world every few days), are for the moment stable after a clear election outcome. These are all tools of American power and reinforce the perception of American power.
In the world’s three most important conflict zones, Trump can deal a blow to China’s own power ambitions — indirectly in the Middle East and directly in Ukraine and Asia. Israel’s gains in Lebanon and Gaza, and the fall of Assad, present — with the right nudge from Washington — an opportunity for a regional settlement, including normalization of Israel’s ties with Saudi Arabia. The joker card here is Iran, which, weakened, might be tempted to try to go nuclear. Or Israel might be tempted to preemptively stop it. Iran lacks strong allies, though. China has sought to nudge the U.S. back commercially in the Middle East, and is looking for political and strategic ways in. Trump can keep them closed by embracing a clear strategy and leadership role. The U.S. is lucky that Russia, which Barack Obama allowed into Syria, has been embarrassed and pushed out of there after the fall of Assad.
Ukraine is another story. China is a party to the conflict through its military support for Putin’s war. For Putin, the war feels existential to his regime (for the Ukrainians it’s existential fullstop). For China, his defeat would be a defeat for Beijing. That’s why the outcome in Ukraine is watched closely in Asia, the region — above all in U.S.-allied capitals like Tokyo, Seoul and Manila — where the next world war could most likely begin. Japan, South Korea and Singapore, in my conversations with their national security officials, see in Ukraine a test of America’s seriousness and commitment to allies and America’s willingness to keep China in check.
One might hope for more from an American president than a mere reaffirmation of existing security commitments. That’s a low bar. In one version of the “America First,” isolationist Trump he doesn’t clear it. But I’ve heard officials in Asia, the Middle East and Europe voice a hope — not quite an expectation — that Trump could be an improvement on Joe Biden. This might sound like convenient criticism of an outgoing president. But even before the election, top national security officials complained about lack of strategic vision and a sense of urgency in the outgoing administration’s approach to Ukraine, the Gaza crisis, or China’s threatening posture in the Pacific. Even many Europeans, put on a lie detector, would trade in Biden’s support for their beloved “multilateralism” for a more decisive U.S. approach. Trump’s preference for a results-oriented, business-like approach could translate into successes that make him and the U.S. look strong.
“The Biden team knows the Middle East as well as anyone,” one official in the Persian Gulf told me earlier this month. “But there is a difference between engagement and leadership. Yes, Biden was engaged …” this official added, letting the thought hang, before invoking failures in Afghanistan and Gaza. Another senior diplomat who works closely with the U.S. was blunter: “They were playing poker with their hands showing.” This gives Trump an opening to strike a contrast.
This vision of strong American leadership in the world won’t make all of MAGA happy. These global decision makers — in different places and from a span of political camps — would want Trump to sand off MAGA’s sharp protectionist edges and keep America the world’s economic leader. They want access to American technology and markets. They would want him to add muscle to America’s military capabilities to enable the U.S. to “strike deals” with adversaries from a position of strength that are in America’s and its allies’ interests.
Trump can do the strong leader act, playing off perceptions of Biden’s frailties. His unpredictability is a feature of it. For allies as well as enemies the thing that would make the act feel real is for Trump to be what he wasn’t the first time around: reliable. The Saudis are sore about Trump’s restrained response to Iran’s attack on their oil refineries in 2019. South Koreans are sore about his freelancing diplomacy with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un without keeping them in the loop. Thinking back to the first term, the Europeans worry Trump can’t be relied on to honor NATO’s pledge to mutual self-defense. Neighboring Canadians and Mexicans, two of America’s biggest economic and diplomatic partners, aren’t being unreasonable to expect a reliable partner on trade and border security in Washington.
There is an obvious tension between what a strong Trump abroad and a strong Trump to his base might look like. The domestic Trump threatens to tear up trade deals and pull American troops home. The strong Trump abroad asserts American power to shape the world. It’s not as if the man isn’t used to his own contradictions.
