RECKLESS DRIVING

Global Events in 2025 Will Accelerate Dangerously

by Bill Paton, 10 November 2024, Phuket 1050 words

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The pace of global events is accelerating and the risks for 2025, especially of a great war, bigger than ever. We need our leaders to avoid reckless driving and slow down a bit, carefully navigating the many dangerous bends in the road ahead.

Despite what we think, or wish to believe, the pace of technological change is now slower than it was in the 20th century.(1) Home robots or fusion power, for instance, are slow in coming. In contrast, it is the pace of geopolitical and geo-economic events that is now faster than ever, scarily so.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic ended, we have seen a number of new wars, beginning with the re-start of the war in Ukraine in early 2022, a war in Sudan since April 2023, and new outbreaks of war in the Middle East just over a year ago. In addition to pulverizing Gaza, systematically murdering its people en masse (genocide), Israel has also attacked Hezbollah in Lebanon (who were attacking them), as well as other targets in Iraq, Iran (who attacked back), Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen (who have been choking off Western shipping through the Red Sea in retaliation for the Gaza genocide). All of this has been done using heavy U.S. weapons, and heavy U.S. diplomatic cover and cover fire.

Just in the last month or so we have seen Trump's tumultuous re-election, protests rocking Georgia in the continuing tug of war between Russia and the West, an absurd declaration of martial law in South Korea, a collapsed government in France and collapsed coalition in Germany—Europe's two biggest economies—cancelled elections in Romania, deadly riots and a state of emergency in Mongolia, and the fall of the Syrian regime to Islamist rebels. Bizarrely, the rebels were assisted by the U.S., UK and France, while at the same time a $10m U.S. bounty remained on the head of their leader, a former Al Qaeda fighter. It is apparent that world events are occurring faster and faster. Even a dedicated news-reader can find it hard to keep up with events, much less understand them.

While serious efforts at measurement largely demonstrate that the pace of global political events is indeed accelerating, there is little agreement on why. Some argue that the decline of the perceived legitimacy of American hegemony is causing a period of growing, global social unrest. Others link the acceleration to the accelerating production of information. Viral memes, for instance, have shorter and shorter lifespans, illustrating how the pace is constantly picking up. Others argue we have transitioned from a post-war era to a pre-war era. Climate change is also contributing to the chaos. This author sees the rise of the developing world, China foremost, as the key-most factor, creating a newly multi-polar world order and thus a thirst for fairer representation in global affairs that is supplanting U.S. leadership.

President re-elect Trump is not going to help matters, priding himself in being 'the great disruptor'. He has already long since declared plans to disrupt world trade, upend several wars, forcibly re-impose American supremacy including the dollar's dominance, bring revolutionary change to America's governance systems, stop China's rise, ignore climate change and generally cause as much havoc as he can.

We are facing an unprecedented number of major risks in the coming year. For instance, we can expect a further intensification of the 'tech war' between the U.S and China. Beijing recently stopped export to the U.S. of a number of rare earth metals, over which China has a near monopoly, that are essential in manufacturing semi-productors. The U.S. continues to curb tech exports to China, most recently adding 140 more Chinese companies to its blacklist.

We can also expect a heating up of a broader trade war, led by President Trump who has so far threatened to impose tariffs on dozens of countries, from Canada, to Mexico, to China to Europe, its four largest trade partners. To this we must factor in a recent free trade agreement between Europe and most of South America, which President re-elect Trump's White House will no doubt try to bully enough EU governments into not ratifying, and thus blocking.

We are even witnessing a widening of economic disparities among countries, a gap that had been narrowing for some time. Poorer countries, and especially their poorer segments, are slipping behind again—their growth slowed since the pandemic—and the fight against poverty has stalled. Many developing countries are thus still pursuing freer trade and greater globalization in their determination to raise their own living standards, while the U.S. will stubbornly try to row the boat in the opposite direction, back into trade protectionism intended to restore the status quo ante.

The threat of war looms in several regions, including the possibility of a further-expanded war in Europe, where Russia has now menacingly revised its nuclear weapons policy to allow their use against an attacker assisted by a nuclear-armed power, meaning Ukraine and the Western nuclear powers. Trump's boast that he would end that war soon after his election has instead spurred Russian advances and the prospect that the Ukrainian front could collapse. Meanwhile, the U.S. is getting ready to deploy nuclear-capable launchers in Germany in 2026, while China steadily builds a large enough nuclear arsenal to withstand, and thus deter, a first strike.

We are living in scary times, with a frenetic pace. With regime change in Syria, and an Islamist regime likely taking power there, the Middle East seems destined to continue to smoulder if not escalate into more open war, possibly the largest war there ever. There are also major risks on the Korean Peninsula, in the South China Sea and surrounding Taiwan, and numerous, 'forgotten wars' in places like Congo and Myanmar.

Sane cooperation between the U.S. and China, the two greatest powers, in the interest of peace and mutual development, is all it would take to bring back a good measure of global stability, beginning with an end to the war in Ukraine. Sadly, greater, senseless confrontation seems far more likely. Even in places as far as the Arctic Circle, friction among the U.S., Russia and China, in particular, is intensifying.

As the threads between all these events are woven ever thicker, they are ever more unpredictable in their consequences. Let us hope key international leaders will not practice reckless driving, accelerating into the curves of 2025. May they instead, wisely touch the brakes and slow down a bit, before what will be an unprecedented number of dangerous bends in the road ahead.

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1) For instance in 1927, Charles Lindbergh made the first flight across the Atlantic Ocean (and then cockily flew into Orville Wright's place in Dayton, Ohio, for dinner). Just 42 years later, in 1969, Lindbergh was invited by Neil Armstrong to witness the Saturn V launch that took him for a stroll on the moon.

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