This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘What to expect in 2025’
Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This is the last edition of 2024, so I thought we’d round up where we are in world affairs with three of my favourite pundits. Alexander Gabuev is head of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center based in Berlin. Jeremy Shapiro’s the director of the Washington office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. And Karin von Hippel is director of the Royal United Services Institute here in London. Last year’s been hugely turbulent in Ukraine, the Middle East, Europe and the United States. So what can we look forward to in 2025?
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Donald Trump voice clip
I wanna thank the American people for the extraordinary honour of being elected your 47th president and your 45th president. And every citizen, I will fight for you, for your family and your future. Every single day I will be fighting for you, and with every breath in my body I will not rest until we have delivered the strong, safe and prosperous America that our children deserve — and that you deserve. This will truly be the golden age of America. That’s what we have . . .
Gideon Rachman
Donald Trump’s electoral victory was the capstone event of the last year. His actual return to the White House will shape world events over the next months. I recorded my conversation with Jeremy, Karin and Sasha earlier this month as part of the FT’s Global Boardroom series in front of an audience of FT subscribers. I was in Washington at the time, and the morning we were talking, it was clear the Assad regime was wobbling, although hadn’t quite fallen. I began the conversation by asking Jeremy about Trump’s appointments to the top jobs in his new administration. What do they tell us?
Jeremy Shapiro
To me, by and large, what we’re seeing is — and I think that this frankly, comes through from the last term — that the main criteria for appointment is in the first instance, loyalty and secondly, that they have to kind of look good on Fox News or in a suit. I think when they take a picture of this cabinet, I will predict on January 20th, it will be the cabinet with the best jawline in American history. And beyond that, I think we’re looking at a sort of random assortment of people, and particularly for issues that don’t come to presidential attention, they will have quite a lot of freedom and will exercise quite a bit of discretion. But I think they are collectively a somewhat random assortment, and so I think what we can predict is a lot of incoherence, a lot of chaos and a shocking amount of infighting. All of these things were characterised the first Trump administration, so they’re not very outrageous predictions.
Gideon Rachman
Yeah. A Washington think-tank has said to me it won’t be so much team of rivals as nest of vipers. But Karin, what do you make of it? Do you discern any kind of coherent policy lines coming out of this?
Karin von Hippel
I fully agree with what Jeremy said. I actually also think that it almost doesn’t matter. It’s not worth trying to predict policy coherence because most of those people won’t be there by the end of the year. So to add to Jeremy’s list of incoherence and chaos and infighting, it’ll just be a lot of turnover as well, as we saw the last time around. And at the end of the day, if any of these people not only goes for too much attention on their own or oversteps in an area that he cares about, they’ll either be gone or they’ll be smacked back pretty quickly. You know, it’s almost like what he’s doing with his appointments is like a Jackson Pollock painting. He’s just throwing everything at the wall, throwing a lot of crazy characters at the wall in hopes that some of those guys will get through. And so I think it’ll be hard for the Senate to say no to most of them, but they certainly will say no to a few of the more egregious ones. But that does mean some will get through that probably shouldn’t get through.
Gideon Rachman
Yeah, I mean, Sasha, so you’re sitting in Berlin, but follow two countries particularly closely as Russia and China. What do you think the Russians and the Chinese are making of all this?
Alexander Gabuev
It’s like birthday, Christmas, New Year in the Kremlin all in one day. You can uncork whatever’s left of your stash of vintages and hope that maybe sanctions are leaked. And even if there is no deal inside on Ukraine, which I think is problematic, because I don’t see any reasons why the Kremlin would climb down from some of its maximalist demands for how this war should end, the level of incoherence in Trump’s White House and the transpiring second-order effects in the transatlantic relationships and in relationship between the US and Ukraine is definitely something to celebrate. That’s where Putin’s team will be much more coherent, united and disciplined.
And obviously, Putin puts a lot of emphasis on his personal diplomacy with Trump. I think that it’s very different in China. All of these guys are entirely new for China. Most of the people on the national security team and on the economic team have never set foot in PRC. Some of them have been to Taiwan and they are friendly with the Taiwanese administration. And back channels are not really there other than maybe Elon Musk, who has access. So plenty of reasons to be worried if you’re Xi Jinping and his team.
Gideon Rachman
Right. I mean you mentioned Russia, Ukraine, and if there’s one issue that people are particularly focused on, it’s Trump’s promise to end the war in a day. How do you think the Russians are going to deal with a peace proposal? Are they ready to talk?
Alexander Gabuev
They’re definitely ready to talk. They don’t want to appear as people who don’t want to talk. And Putin has been saying from day one like, I was forced into this war. I’m ready for diplomacy. And he will definitely, in private conversations with Trump, say, Mr President, you said on campaign trail that this war wouldn’t happen if the other side didn’t steal the election in 2020 from you, and I totally agree. Both of us would have avoided this war if only not Joe Biden. So massaging Trump’s ego is something that Putin is pretty skilled at, and he’s already doing that in public. I think that he can be persuasive in private. Let’s see how that works.
Everybody I’m talking to who is somewhat close to where this black box of Kremlin decision-making is says there are no indication that Mr Putin has climbed down from very high bar of his ultimate goal for this war, eradicating a sovereign independent Ukraine. Time out for the war that gives Russia a pause for maybe four years as Trump is in White House to rearm and be able to come back is probably something welcome. Russia would love to have a timeout, provided that in the meantime, Ukraine will not be able to get stronger. So all of the flow of western equipment, training and support will need to be curtailed, will stop. I think that’s the crux of the issue.
Gideon Rachman
You said in your first answer that the Russians will be feeling pretty positive about the way things are going, at least in Washington. They seem to be making progress on the battlefield. And yet we also hear these disquieting reports from Putin, this point of view about the economy, inflation, high anecdotes that stick in the mind about butter being sort of locked up in cabinets because it’s being stolen from supermarkets. Are the sanctions finally beginning to bite?
Alexander Gabuev
I think that’s the key rate of 21 per cent that very likely to be hiked.
Gideon Rachman
That’s the interest rate.
Alexander Gabuev
That’s the interest rate. That doesn’t signal a very healthy economy. This prohibitive credit makes a lot of business model absolutely bankrupt. So next year, we might see some bankruptcies of large property developers and several other sectors that are hit particularly hard by very expensive credit. And the inflation is also not tamed because if you pour so much money into defence, if you have labour shortages because you’re spending so many lives of Russian than on the front lines, that creates this tensions and trade-offs in the economy that you can probably muddle through in ’25 but are increasingly creating constraints in ’26 for sure.
Gideon Rachman
So Jeremy, Sasha’s, I think, totally right. Everybody’s talking about security guarantees. Is there much creative thinking about how you can persuade the Ukrainians that a ceasefire is not just a stay of execution and that they will somehow survive without Russia coming straight back at them?
Jeremy Shapiro
Well, it’s a tremendous amount of creative thinking on that question in Washington. But I think the question you’re really getting at probably is, is there creative thinking within the Trump camp? If you look at the sort of Keith Kellogg plan . . .
Gideon Rachman
Keith Kellogg, to remind, is?
Jeremy Shapiro
Keith Kellogg is the recently nominated Russia-Ukraine envoy for Trump. And so he is ostensibly in charge of setting up this negotiation and sort of organising it for Trump. And there is a sort of plan there, but if you look at the plan, it’s really more about getting to the negotiation than it is about settling the conflict — which is actually, you know, not stupid, frankly, because you don’t want to put your cards up front. But I don’t think that they really have much idea of what they’re looking for. And to be honest with you, this reflects Donald Trump’s perspective on this problem, which I think is quite clear, which is that he doesn’t care how it comes out. He just cares that it does come out. He wants to have a deal. He wants to have a signing ceremony, you know, optimally on the White House lawn. And he wants to, you know, get the Nobel Peace Prize for it. You know, that’s in some ways a useful negotiating position because it’s quite flexible. But on the other hand, it means that he’s quite manipulable.
And a key game here for both the Russians and the Ukrainians will be to try to structure it such that the other seems at fault to Donald Trump. And therefore the idea is to be as forthcoming as possible, but look for ways to subtly stymie the negotiation. I think both of them will actually want to do that and blame the other. In terms of what the Trump people are thinking of security guarantees, I think really they’re just thinking about a sort of bilateral executive promise to defend Ukraine. That much is sort of in the Kellogg plan. There’s no Nato membership and there’s no Senate treaty of any sort. And then they’re contemplating and here we’re guessing, a sort of Israel approach, where what they’ll be doing is selling a lot of weapons, developing a lot of defence industrial base in Ukraine to create a Ukraine which is capable of defending itself and deterring future Russian invasions. And that will be a difficult subject of negotiation with the Russians. I think the distinction with the relationship with Israel is that they will be getting a lot of US weapons, but the US won’t be paying for them. The idea is that the Europeans will be paying for them.
Gideon Rachman
So Karin, another idea that’s doing the rounds is that, well, if Nato’s off the table but you want some kind of security guarantee that goes beyond the Israel idea, that maybe Europeans might step up either with the security guarantee or by putting British, French, German troops in harm’s way in Ukraine. Have you heard that?
Karin von Hippel
Look, Europeans throw a lot of ideas out there. Most of them aren’t very realistic. I don’t know what the Europeans can do right now. They just don’t have the capacity to do a lot more in a substantial way militarily. It’s going to be difficult to provide any sort of guarantees to Ukraine. I wouldn’t worry about Nato right now because I’m not sure Trump would defend another country if they got invaded, another smaller Nato country. So I don’t know if Nato’s guarantees would matter right now either. So it puts Ukraine in a difficult position, really, because they do wanna end the war. But what can they do to prevent that from happening again, to prevent them from coming back, as Sasha and Jeremy are both saying, in three or four years?
Gideon Rachman
Yeah. I mean Sasha, one of the things that you hear a lot in sort of strategic circles in the west is this talk of this new axis, which perhaps we should always be a bit nervous when we discover new axes. But they’re saying North Korea, Iran, Russia, China working together and trying to basically overturn the US-led world order. How real do you think that is?
Alexander Gabuev
I think that it’s nowhere close to the very high standard of Article V, that treaty alliances that are based on values that are based on decades and decades and decades of shared military planning, military training, doctrine, equipment, like there is a lot of depth. These are a set of transactional relationships between various regimes. I wouldn’t brush that off as immaterial. I think that’s pretty material, particularly the Russia-China link, as the two large nuclear armed superpowers that are getting deeper, that have not identical but complementary security obsessions in the Pacific and in European theatre and standing back to back. But I wouldn’t lose my sleep. And I think that framing that way can be dangerous, because it only emboldens them and gives them ideas on what they should do more together.
Gideon Rachman
Again Jeremy, I mean you, I know, tried to talk to the Russians, to the Chinese. What’s your sense of their relationship?
Jeremy Shapiro
Well, they really dislike each other, but I think that that doesn’t really get in the way of the transactional relationship that Sasha described, because they have found each other to be useful in any number of ways. They are not even pretending to impinge upon each other for the long term. They don’t trust each other fully, but they don’t need to. And the common enemy is quite binding. So even though they have all sorts of worries about it, the relationship is definitely working for both of them at current level. I don’t think particularly the Chinese want to up that level dramatically, really at all. But I also don’t think they are interested in separating from them because they are quite useful in their bigger problem, which is the United States.
Gideon Rachman
Since Sasha is Russia’s leading expert on China, just interested to get your take on that. Do you agree with Jeremy that there’s a sort of level of mutual distrust bordering on contempt between the Russians and Chinese, or is he just an American that’s misunderstanding what’s in front of him?
Alexander Gabuev
I think that Jeremy is very right on the Chinese side. OK, we are speaking about our own data set like tens or like maybe hundreds of people we know. I know a lot of players on both sides in this relationship in particular. And I think that on the Chinese side, I agree. Well, China is a huge superpower and they all the time tell after a couple of shots or many shots of baijiu, they would say, well, you used to be the elder brother, Soviet Union (speaks Chinese), and now you are a shadow. You’re smaller than Guangdong province in economic terms. You are a dwarf in many other terms that make the comprehensive national power: science, space, chips, all of that. You don’t have it. We do.
On the Russian side, I think to Jeremy, I disagree. I notice shifts in perception. Older generation is still there, very distrustful, actually very much missing the old relationship. I think that if you would have a chance to get Sergei Lavrov really drunk on Black Label, which is his preferred brand of whisky since he was hosted in New York, if you would have a really honest conversation, maybe, just maybe, you would get a response that, oh it was so nice 15 years back when we were partners and we were doing reset and I and Kerry did this deal around chemical weapons in Syria. But I think with younger generation of Russians, they don’t necessarily believe that China is their friend. They understand that China is very selfish and pragmatic and China has leverage.
But I notice a lot of admiration and respect for what China has achieved among youngish technocrats, people at the central banks, entrepreneurs. People are discovering China. People are really understanding that it’s not the Soviet Union. The Chinese figured it out right in many aspects. And like all of this boom about teaching your kids Chinese, you know, travelling to China and so on is there and it’s real. And the path that Russia will be a giant nuclear armed Canada, where China is the US, right? That type of relationship. That’s one of the very likely outcomes of this war.
Gideon Rachman
OK. So Karin, we should talk about the Middle East. And I told the listeners some years ago you were chief of staff to the American commander who was trying to combat Isis or Isil, and now suddenly things are on the move in Syria. What do you think the US will be thinking about this? Because there is this nasty tendency that you get rid of somebody terrible in the Middle East and somebody even worse comes along.
Karin von Hippel
You know, Jeremy and I were both actually working on Syria at the same firm even before I was joining the counter-Isil as the Arab Spring was under way. And when the Syrian civil war started in 2011, we all thought by Thanksgiving Assad will be gone. And of course, we know that didn’t happen. It’s quite clever. I think if any of us have thought about it, we would have said, of course it’s a perfect time for the rebels to push back because Iran is weak, because Hizbollah troops are being destroyed, because Russia is distracted. So it’s very clever of them to do it.
We don’t know enough about HTS, you know, it’s a jihadist umbrella. You know, they have been affiliated to Isil in the past, but they’re claiming the 2.0 version is not as apocalyptic as Isil was. They have a national agenda, etc. It’s very hard to know right now, and it’s hard to know how they’ll do. They’re being supported by Turkey. You also have the Kurds getting a bit more involved, too. So, the bigger concern will be a humanitarian concern. Syria has been in a sort of a stagnant situation. Will it slip back into an intense civil war again? That’s really the big worry.
Gideon Rachman
Karin, one last question on the Middle East and then I’ll come to the questions in the chat. Obviously, it’s been an incredibly grim year in the Middle East, culminating in Netanyahu actually being indicted by the International Criminal Court. Do you think there’s any hope of the war in Gaza winding down? We’ve got a fragile ceasefire in Lebanon. Might we have a better year in the Middle East?
Karin von Hippel
Let’s hope so. I mean, here’s another area where Trump’s ego could push him to do the right thing. He probably has more sway over Netanyahu than certainly the Biden administration has had, which we’ve seen throughout this conflict in Gaza. But it’s not clear to me he thinks that there should be a two-state solution. And so it’s very hard to understand what can happen in Gaza without a road map. Now, he does wanna do a deal with the Saudis, and the Saudis, I suspect, won’t budge on their line that we will only do a deal with Israel if Israel is on an irrevocable path to a two-state solution.
So it’s possible that the Saudis would be able to put enough pressure on Trump to make that happen. He doesn’t really care what happens to the Palestinians. And so he will have to be pressured into doing the right thing by other partners in the region.
Gideon Rachman
OK. So turning to the chat, there’s a question on tech, which we haven’t talked about, which says: Do Big Tech companies have or will they have a role in the rearrangement of the most significant current conflicts both in military and economics? Does the need to maintain intense, productive and commercial flows between regions of the world help or hinder prospects of peace?
Yeah, I mean, I guess that has all sorts of implications, but one obvious one is Taiwan, which we haven’t discussed. Is Taiwan made a little bit safer by the fact that it is the centre of the world’s most advanced semiconductor production?
Karin von Hippel
The Taiwanese, you know, they say we have a silicon shield, right? And that’s what they think is their deterrence factor. It’s not clear to me that that would be the case. But what could happen if there is a war in the Taiwan Strait is that the spillover effects could be far worse than what we’ve seen in Ukraine. You know, I think we started to understand in a significant way that some of these wars can have enormous spillover effects at the global level, as Ukraine has with energy shortages and food insecurity, etc. I think with Taiwan, whatever would happen to TSMC and these companies, whether they would blow themselves up, whether the Americans would stop designing and sending products to Taiwan to manufacture, whether we all go analogue, I mean there could be some serious implications of a war in the strait, not to mention enormous sanctions on China.
Now, it’s not clear to me, though, what Trump might do in this situation as well. So it’s a bit unclear. The first time around, he was quite supportive of Taiwan. He called President Tsai before he even came to office or took a call from her. And this time around, he’s seeming softer on protecting Taiwan. He thinks that they owe us a lot of money, that they stole our tech industry, which of course, isn’t true, especially with silicon chips.
Gideon Rachman
So, Sasha, in fact, that connects quite neatly to another question that came in, which is how has Russia’s quagmire in Ukraine affected Xi’s calculations on invading Taiwan? I was in a . . . one of these seminars a couple of days ago and was very struck there was a China expert that was very unequivocal in saying, you know, he’s decided he’s gonna do it. What’s your view?
Alexander Gabuev
I think that there are a number of constraints in that decision for Xi Jinping. For one, he’s economy’s not doing great. I think he’s very much aware of the tremendous economic costs that it will pose, not only because of semiconductor industry disruption, but overall. Just imagine the Taiwanese shooting back with all of the missiles at population centres in Fujian, Guangdong province, Zhejiang, Shanghai, the manufacturing hubs, the financial hubs. So that might risk the internal stability of China. And for him and for the party, that’s probably paramount consideration.
And then he’s also not blind to the degree of corruption and inefficiency in his army. That’s one of the lessons he has learned from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Putin’s army promised him that they are best in class, that they will take Kyiv in three days, and Putin believed that. Well, it turned out that the military machine is quite rotten. So Xi Jinping went after one and another defence ministers and senior defence officials and we now had investigation in the third minister that he has in three years. And I think that to me that gives hope that he sees his military machine and says, OK, we are not ready yet.
My concern over role of tech is that since these big powers are struggling with each other — definitely not talking to each other, climate, the COP process, is a very good indication — while we are at the beginning of the spiral of the rapid development of technology that few of us I don’t claim to understand AI. But I think that Gideon, you and I have been in couple of interesting conferences this summer where people who work on this tell you that it’s only the beginning. It’s gonna be geometrical progression and that it’s too late to regulate it, even if big powers want it to. And now the key question is: if you deploy AI to power large weapons systems, will you remove humans in the loop or not? And since that non-democratic adversaries will remove humans because they care about speed of decision-making, they don’t care about consequences, we democracies should do that. So if that’s the mindset in key countries that possess the technology and possess these large weapons arsenals, I think that it’s pretty scary thought.
Gideon Rachman
Yeah, that was one of the more unsettling continuing conversations throughout the year, this sense that all these kind of geopolitical arguments, which seem so important, may turn out to be quite small squabbles compared to the rapid development of AI. But the last question’s come in, somebody should moonlight as a moderator because they’ve asked a very good last question, which is: Could each of the panellists say what they think is the most likely geopolitical escalation or de-escalation in 2025? Jeremy, why don’t you go?
Jeremy Shapiro
I think that there will be de-escalation in the Israel front next year, mostly because the Israelis have accomplished most of what they need to do. I think there’s a much greater chance of escalation in Ukraine or maybe not in Ukraine, but really in the Russia-west conflict. I think we’re in a very dangerous moment there where the Russians certainly perceive quite a bit of escalation coming from the west in recent weeks and months. And the west perceives the same thing coming from Russia, and I think kind of they’re both right. And, you know, there are significant reasons that neither of them would want that. But they have so little trust in each other, and I’m not sure that the Donald Trump initiative to create these negotiations, I think, as I said, he can succeed in creating them. But I’m not at all convinced that he can succeed at concluding them. And that may well increase the escalatory dynamics whether he wants them to or not.
Gideon Rachman
That’s a rather grim prediction. Sasha, what do you think?
Alexander Gabuev
I agree with Jeremy on Ukraine. And I would add the South China Sea or Taiwan, and the trigger for that would be incoming Trump’s team showing to China that they are strong, that they are much more powerful and ready to be pushy and even aggressive. And with that, it will be definitely something that China cannot ignore. They will need to react in one way or another. You remember Chinese reaction to the Nancy Pelosi visit to Taiwan. Something like that that could also spiral out of control and bring us to a pretty dangerous situation, either in the South China Sea, around Philippines or in Taiwan Strait.
Gideon Rachman
OK, Karin, you got the last word. Can you think of anything optimistic?
Karin von Hippel
Well, I’m just trying to think of something a little bit more unexpected because often we get surprised by what happens. So whether that’s in North Korea or, you know, another part of the world where something quite cataclysmic happens and it changes the political dynamics on the ground, I always feel is dangerous to predict because as Jeremy says, well, most of us are usually wrong when we do try to predict. But I would just say watch out for a place we didn’t anticipate blowing up or imploding. And I also think that India and China are gonna have more of a rapprochement in the next year. You know, whether or not that will help de-escalate other conflicts remains to be seen. But we can’t forget about India. I think India is gonna play a more and more important role on the global stage.
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Gideon Rachman
That was Karin von Hippel ending this edition of the Rachman Review, you also heard from Jeremy Shapiro and from Alexander Gabuev. And that’s it for now and for this year. Thanks for joining us throughout the year, and please join me again in 2025. The new editions of the Rachman Review.