2025 geopolitical outlook: Prepare for a perilous year

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On Thursday, five former presidents gathered to honor a sixth. All of them faced geopolitical change and challenge during their time as commander in chief. But even Cold War-era President Jimmy Carter, whose state funeral brought Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton together, didn’t face an era as fraught as today, according to two foreign-policy experts whose organizations’ highly anticipated, annual outlooks were released in recent days.

2025 is “the most dangerous year geopolitically, frankly, since the early Cold War or maybe even the 1930s,” said Ian Bremmer, bracingly, as the president and founder of geopolitical risk advisory firm Eurasia Group introduced its “Top Risks 2025” report in a call with reporters.

In part, that’s because as opposed to a Western-led G7 era or a more multipolar G20 geopolitical environment, today’s framework can be best described as G-Zero, said Bremmer, who added that going forward, “global disorder” will be “the dominant geopolitical disordering principle for how the world works.”

Or doesn’t work. In part because the U.S., still the world’s most powerful country and long a builder and beneficiary of the rules-based international order, will, according to Bremmer, soon be “oriented towards unilateralism on the global stage, a much more transactional approach to foreign policy, and renouncing U.S.-led multilateralism and support for those global institutions and rule of law.”

For the 30 years that the International Crisis Group has been surveying the geopolitical landscape and issuing its annual “10 Conflicts to Watch” report, there was “a sense in which Western liberalism, the liberal order, could come together under the banner of multilateralism to tackle a number of post-Cold War conflicts,” Comfort Ero, ICG’s British-based president and CEO, told participants in a call organized by Foreign Policy magazine. But, she said, “probably from 2012 with the Arab Spring, fast forward where today it’s really about big-power rivalry,” which she added can be seen “in the mix of wars rising in every region that we watch.”

Places like Syria, which tops ICG’s list, is also of key concern to Thomas Hanson, who will present his annual “U.S. Foreign Policy Outlook” to a capacity crowd at a Global Minnesota event at the University of Minnesota on Jan. 23. Hanson, a former Foreign Service officer who is now diplomat-in-residence at the University of Minnesota Duluth, said that Syria “has gone from being a fulcrum to a vacuum in very short order,” explaining that the country, free from the homicidal Assad dynasty, has “extremely fragile polities with all kinds of subgroups and sub-religions within them, so the possibility of further fracturing is there.”

And that possibility, part of a broader dismantling of Iran’s “axis of resistance” to Israel, could cause the theocracy to make a dash to deploy a nuclear weapon. This is a key concern in the Eurasia Group’s calculus too, with “Iran on the ropes” as its sixth risk, stating: “The Middle East will remain a combustible environment in 2025 for one big reason: Iran hasn’t been this weak in decades.” Any “accident or miscalculation that kills a significant number of Israelis or Americans could trigger an escalatory spiral with material implications for the supply and price of oil.”

If a weakened Iran tries to strengthen its hand — or, more profoundly, ensure the survival of the theocracy – through nuclear proliferation it would come amidst an era of degraded deterrence. “We’ve been living in this nuclear age for exactly 80 years,” said Hanson. “We’re not dealing with it well.”

And in fact, arms-control treaties between the U.S. and Russia are disintegrating all the while countries like China are integrating more nuclear weapons into their arsenals (while the U.S. seeks to upgrade its nuclear forces). Meanwhile, North Korea seeks better delivery systems for its reckless weapons development, leading Hanson to conclude with “concern about the nuclear issue; we’re focused on all kinds of other things.”

And the international institutions whose mission it is to focus on keeping the peace or alleviating wartime misery are missing the mark, at best, said Ero. Mentioning Myanmar and Haiti — which along with Sudan, Ukraine and European security, Israel-Palestine, Iran vs. the U.S. and Israel, the Korean Peninsula, China-U.S., and, strikingly, the U.S. and Mexico, are on the ICG’s conflicts list — Ero said it “fits a pretty bleak picture, the humanitarian catastrophe, displacement, refugees scattered within their country and outside.” What “makes this period exceptional or appear worse is that the systems that we’ll usually rely on — either the United Nations, the European Union, multilateral, regional bodies like the African Union — they all appear to be failing or have been curtailed in their own mandate or peace and security.”

And, Ero added, “a number of countries that you would often depend on, rely on to be the shapers, the influencers, the ones we’re able to pressure, do not necessarily have that capacity or are being outflanked and outranked by other players, newer players who were previously dormant but are rising to create facts on the ground in their regions or worldwide.”

The facts on the ground result in some “ungoverned spaces,” listed as risk No. 9 by the Eurasia Group. Other ungoverned or under-governed spaces aren’t nations but transnational forces, like artificial intelligence, which is but one reason “AI Unbound” is listed as the eighth risk. 2025, the report posits, “will mark another period of relentless technological development unbound by adequate safeguards and governance frameworks.”

Conversely, countries like Russia with too much repressive governance, and a desire to impose it on others, remains a risk too (No. 5 on Eurasia Group’s list). “Russia is now the world’s leading rogue power by a large margin, and [President] Vladimir Putin will pursue more policies that undermine the U.S.-led global order despite a likely ceasefire in Ukraine,” the analysis asserts, adding that “Russia will do more than any other country to subvert the global order in 2025.”

But America, long looked at as the bulwark against such subversion, seems less likely to curb it, and in fact may create some of its own, as evidenced by Trump’s hemispheric emphasis this week on Panama, Canada and Greenland (and by extension, Denmark, which like Canada is a fellow NATO nation).

While the president-elect is “more experienced and better organized” in 2025 than in 2017, the Eurasia Group states in describing its second risk, “the erosion of independent checks on executive power and active undermining of the rule of law will leave more of U.S. policy dependent on the decisions of one powerful man rather than on established and politically impartial legal principles.”

What’s more, according to the third risk, labeled “U.S.-China breakdown,” is that “Trump’s return to office will unleash an unmanaged decoupling in the world’s most important geopolitical relationship. That, in turn, risks a major economic disruption and broader crisis.”

It’s not just Beijing but other capitals that Trump will disrupt. Still, said Bremmer, the incoming president “is not the lead risk; Trump is the principal symptom that comes from a G-Zero world.” And yet he remains central, said Ero: “The core thread of the 10 conflicts this year is Trump, and the return of Trump in the midst of big-power rivalry and competition.”

Whether that thread unravels remains to be seen, but Washington — and the world — should prepare for a perilous new year, and perhaps new era, of international instability.