2025 could be year for history books

From time to time, there are years when the world goes through some fundamental and convulsive change. 1968, with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the disturbances of Paris and the protests of the anti-vietnam war in the United States, was one of them. 1989, the year of the Tiananmen massacre, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Empire, was another.

I was present to see that each of these things happened, and from that perspective it seems to me that, only seven weeks later, 2025 could be a year like this: a time when the basic assumptions about the way in which our world works the crusher.

The basic reason, of course, is Donald Trump.

Since the end of World War II, each of the 13 US presidents before Trump’s current term in office has paid at least one lip service to a set of key geopolitical principles: that the United States’s own security depended on Protect Europe from Russia and not the communist communist from Asia against China.

Trump has overcome this approach. He says that he is putting American interests first, long before everything else. Above all, it is reduced to the only question of how much it costs to the United States.

In itself, this is quite difficult for your friends and allies abroad, especially in Europe. But it becomes much more difficult by Trump’s own personality. No president of the United States in modern times, not even Richard Nixon, lets their personal characteristics shape their policies as Trump do.

“He is like Louis XIV,” a retired American diplomat told me, referring to the Solar King of France.

Critics like this believe that Trump is impressively vain and incredibly thin skin at the same time. As a result, those named around him, people like Elon Musk and JD Vance, maybe they think that his position depends completely on how much they praise him and support his views.

When President Trump affirms, without evidence, that President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is corrupt And it has a low approval index, Musk takes it further: he accumulates to say that Zelensky is despised by the Ukrainian people and is feeding the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers.

It seems that no one in Trump’s circle today will cough discreetly and will say: “Mr. President, maybe he should consider rowing in that statement.”

Judging by its previous term in the position, we can be sure that each of the people around it knows how it hates will disagree. And they will also know that many voters support the Trump approach with all my heart, and feel they have been financed security in a distant continent.

He has promised to stop the Ukraine War in Easter. He is absolutely correct when he says that President Vladimir Putin is interested in this. Russian troops are, through the force of numbers, making slow advances in the eastern part of Ukraine.

But the cost in Russian life is immense. If the process continues, Russia may have to resort to mandatory military service, which would be dangerously unpopular and could even destabilize the Putin regime. Everything Trump says about getting peace is music for his ears.

John Bolton, Trump’s distant national security advisor during his first administration, said the other day they would be breaking the champagne in the Kremlin when they heard the Trump administration’s peace plan. He certainly felt like a historical moment, not only in Moscow but throughout the world.

Putin has promptly supported the idea that Trump really won the 2020 elections. It may not be true, but President Putin knows that Trump favors anyone who supports his vision of things.

Why, on the contrary, Trump and people surround him so hard with President Zelensky? It must be partly because he is not obediently what they have told him, how to return to the negotiating table and reach an agreement on American access to critical minerals of Ukraine.

At the same time, President Trump understands that Zelensky is the weakest bond in the American-Russian-Ukraine trio, and can be squeezed in a way that Putin cannot be. The more pressure accumulates in Zelensky, the faster a peace agreement will arrive.

President Trump never seems, at least in public, to show a lot of interest in the detail of any agreement. It is the agreement itself that cares, even if Ukraine and its allies believe that it is manifestly unfair and allows Russia to return on a future date and begin the war again.

The British and German diplomats that I know have been enraged by the way Trump took Russia to the negotiating table. “He had two main cards in his hand,” said one. “The first was Russia’s isolation. Putin would have made many concessions to reach conversations with the United States; only Trump did not insist on any concession. He simply let him sit down and start talking.”

The other card, said the diplomat, was to insist that Ukraine should be able to join NATO. “Trump could have hit this and extort all kinds of Putin agreements, before finally saying well, well, Ukraine will not join NATO in that case.” In the European capitals it is considered that he threw his two essential letters even before the conversations began, without any previous condition.

However, since some European diplomats with experience in American politics are advising their governments that this great monarchical period in the presidency of Donald Trump, where his advisors are postponed (literally referred to himself as a “king” this week this week this week ), No last.

Trump currently has control of a Playant Congress and a conservative Supreme Court, but in just 20 months of time, in November 2026, there will be half -period elections in the United States.

There are signs that inflation is beginning to increase in the United States, and enough people can be poorly affected by disorders to want to punish Trump Republicans.

If you lose control of one or both houses, the power you currently have to promote each plan and politics, regardless of how controversial, will decrease.

But a horrible pile can happen next year and eight months. Trump’s expansionism could be emboldened to China. A great international commercial war, caused by Trump’s tariffs, could be opened. The European Union seems likely to become politically and economically weaker than ever.

Agreeing peace in Ukraine in the terms of Russia will be something completely new to the United States. In the vast majority of negotiations since 1945, Russia has fought to go out with it due to the United States economic and military force.

Now President Putin, after having made the expensive decision to invade Ukraine three years ago, it seems that he is likely to get his own and prosper.

If that happens, then 2025 will be remembered as a key year: a time when the history of the world changed, and nothing was the same again.