Now that the artificial deadline imposed by newspapers & magazines on “yearend despatches” is over and the dust has settled, it is time to look back calmly at the year gone by. The title for this blog pretty much suggested itself. 2025 can really be reduced to just two words: geopolitical turbulence. No surprises there. But given below are the megatrends thrown up in the last one year or so.
Parity between two Great Powers: If ever historians look back at the point when China attained a degree of parity with the United States of America, it would have to be the year 2025. Strategic and geopolitical parity are notoriously hard to measure. Even so, multiple reports written by various American agencies openly admit there is only one peer competitor to the US and that is China. And President Trump may have given it his seal of approval when he said on social media that “The G2 will be convening shortly” before his October 2025 meeting with President Xi Jinping. China certainly behaved as America’s equal in 2025, whether it is the tariff war, the tech race or defending its core interests. Things could still change quickly. But for now, it is hard to contest that there are two Great Powers in the world, namely, the US and China. Then, there are the rest.
Uncertainty around traditional alliance structures: The most dramatic example of this phenomenon is obviously the transatlantic alliance, embodied by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). But other individual alliances such as the one that the US has with Japan, Republic of Korea, Australia and Philippines, to name a few, all appear to be under some form of pressure or the other. Part of the uncertainty stems from the American sentiment that treaty allies must share much more of the burden than they have done so far and may also be a consequence of the American strategic retrenchment expressed by its National Security Strategy that the Western Hemisphere will, more than others, be a priority theatre. No one is yet predicting a total breakdown of the alliance structure itself; but it is difficult to see the status quo being maintained. Interestingly, loose alliance-like relations such as those between Russia/China on the one hand and Venzuela/Iran on the other, will also need to be reworked or rethought by the parties concerned, in light of recent events. Last but not least, the “friendship without limits” between Russia and China did have some limits after all. Could the limits to the relationship expand with time?
Total collapse of MFN: Since the end of World War II and the advent of first GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and then the WTO (World Trade Organization), the Most-Favoured-Nation (MFN) principle has been the bedrock of all international trade. But now, the most powerful trading player in the world i.e the US, has formally proposed to the WTO that the practice of MFN should end and is not fit for purpose. Regardless of the validity of this claim, this constitutes a huge departure from how most of the world traded with each other. Some 69 per cent of all existing global trade is still based on MFN. But, this may be expected to see a steep decline in the years ahead. International trade in the future will most certainly be strategic, preferential, reciprocal and most certainly non-MFN. Weaponisation of strategic trade is a brutal reality: look at the issue of controls on semiconductor chips on the one hand, and rare earths on the other. Meanwhile, expect Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and bilateral trade agreements to grow exponentially, undermining MFN further.
RIP Multilateralism: For some years now, multilateralism has been in terminal decline. The reasons are too well known to bear any repetition here. On January 7 this year, the US which is invariably the principal funder of both UN and non-UN organizations, decided to pull out of some 66 international organizations. And without the US, many of these organizations will lose their raison détre. It is too early to say what will replace multilateralism. Some speak of US minus one, but that is easier said than done, as the WTO has now started to realize. Plurilateral institutions such as G20, BRICS, SCO seem to have limits to their functioning as well.
Military Expenditure Soars as conflicts prevail: One defining feature of 2025 has been the continuation of old conflicts and the advent of new ones. The war in Ukraine has continued for the fourth year running; the bombing may have stopped in Gaza but strife persists; Yemen is restless; Sudan is restive; Venezuela is on edge; and China is militarily assertive in its backyard. There were also limited wars elsewhere in the world. The net result of all this is that the rise in annual military expenditure in 2024 (the last year for which data is available) was the steepest in the last 30 years with a ten per cent increase touching 2.8 trillion dollars. This will almost certainly rise in 2025 for reasons mentioned above. War is hugely profitable, as the saying goes!
Technological Disruption: For tech buffs, it is fair to say that 2025 was the year of “irrational exuberance”. The kind of investment made in Artificial Intelligence is truly scary and it is hard not to think of it as a bubble. The American lead in matters tech is incontestable; but what is true is also the fact that China is fast catching up. Witness the emergence of DeepSeek! The tech war will play itself out over the next few years. But 2025 may well have been a turning point.
Multiple Strategic Hedging: There is no index to measure the degree of trust between nations. But if there was one, it would be very very low. This lack of trust between countries, translates into a foreign and security policy characterised by strategic hedging. And when every country hedges against the other, then it constitutes multiple strategic hedging leading to a spaghetti bowl of strategic partnerships of bewildering shapes and colours.
Multipolar but unruly world disorder: Policy wonks have already pronounced the death of the liberal international order which was established in the aftermath of World War II. That is probably true. Equally, people have hastened to announce the advent of a multipolar world based on spheres of influence. This seems a little less certain, if only because there are two Great Powers in serious contestation with one another and then you have the rest which are jostling for space and influence. Yet, the nomenclature “multipolar world” gives a certain degree of assurance to policy wonks who need comforting words to describe the world they see in front of them. The trouble is that the expression “multipolar world order” denotes a certain number of identifiable poles by common agreement and a reasonable semblance of order based on consensus. Both of those simply do not exist as of now. The world is therefore arguably multipolar and is most certainly disorderly, unruly and fractious. And therein lies the problem for decision makers who have to craft meaningful foreign and security policy for their countries.
Dr Mohan Kumar is a former Indian Ambassador to France and the Director General of the newly established Motwani Jadeja Institute for American Studies at the O.P. Jindal Global University. Views are personal.
Diplomacy and Geopolitics 