As the West has been resting over the customary Christmas and New Year period, all manner of geopolitical events have been taking place worldwide. The Middle East is the most prominent in the Western news. The conflict in Gaza continues, with Israel determined to eliminate the last remnants of Hamas, the Islamist terror organisation funded and supplied by Iran, presumably before a 20 January 2025 shut-off by which US President-elect Donald Trump has informed his counterpart Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he expects that conflict to have ended. An uneasy but apparently sustaining ceasefire has prevailed in the Israeli attacks upon Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hezbollah being another Iranian proxy. Israel so far has been limited in its attacks upon Iranian soil but she has struck Iran directly. A Russian proxy in the Middle East, former President Bashar Al-Assad of Syria, has fled to Moscow to be replaced with a Sunni Muslim majority regime of uncertain direction although its leader has been making diplomatic overtures towards the West. The Russian military bases in western Syria on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea are in jeopardy and Russia, bogged down in her invasion of Ukraine, cannot defend them if the Syrians decide to drive Russian forces out.
Uncertainty lies ahead in the United States. President-elect Trump has reportedly had positive conversations with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Zelensky has reported that under President Trump the war in Ukraine is likely to come to an end sooner. For this reason, now that the war is in the third stage of such things where the parties see an end in sight, the fighting has increased and on 30 December 2024 the Russians were reported to have had their single biggest daily death toll in excess of 2,000 soldiers. The North Korean troops sold by Pyongyang to Moscow to defeat the Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk oblast seem to have failed, by all accounts being slaughtered in large numbers. This is no surprise; they know neither the terrain nor the language, and barely recognise the obstacles against them, not being skilled in modern drone and ground warfare. (North Korea has never actually fought a war since the 1951-53 Korean War.) President-elect Trump has made statements to the effect that when you want to strike a deal on behalf of an ally (which is undoubtedly necessary now; Ukrainian troops are exhausted and a severe toll is being taken on the Russian economy) you do not abandon an ally. Some of his cabinet picks, and prior comments of his Vice-President elect, have been less diplomatic.
Military weapons production is now being increasingly focused in Ukraine, who are rekindling skills to make old Soviet-era weaponry because the West is unwilling to (or more accurately, incapable of) supplying weapons necessary for a front line ground war in sufficient numbers. Ukraine is also becoming a leading expert in electronic warfare, in particular cheap FPV drones relevant to front line ground combat - and to blocking them. Therefore Ukraine is going to emerge from a Trump-imposed peace in Ukraine as a major arms producer as well as having the largest army in the western world, In the meantime Poland’s defence expenditures mean that she is overtaking Germany as a military power and hence, in due time, as a military leader and a political power. German politics are in chaos, with an election due in the early part of the year. French politics have dissolved into a messy form of “cohabitation” in which the President keeps picking Prime Ministers the parliament (who can eject the Prime Minister) doesn’t like. The relationship between France and Germany that used to be the backbone of the EU appears increasingly strained amidst the political chaos in both these countries.
European military strength remains atrociously low and this is something over which President Trump will surely apply enormous pressure through threats to leave NATO once he enters office. The British Armed Forces are a mess, despite the country having two aircraft carriers; as a naval power she should have six. Her air force is diminutive as are her armed forces. Even her reversed special forces are under attack with spurious prosecutions for war crimes. Britain needs to re-arm and to strengthen her intelligence connections with the Five-Eyes alliance. This will be difficult during an era of President Trump who does not as a rule trust the intelligence community. France has no aircraft carriers which is a national embarrassment. The magnitude of rearming necessary in Europe is colossal and it will reshape our entire economies, politics and culture here in Europe. Britain is the greatest hope to lead that as it is the largest economy in the region with a stable government.
There are also changes afoot that affect Russia in other corners of what Russia calls the “near abroad”. Russia has managed to manipulate elections to impose a pro-Russian President and government in Tbilisi; presumably this will lead to some sort of peace agreement with Russia in relation to South Ossetia and Abkhazia; the two Russian-occupied Georgian territories. However Russia singularly failed to achieve the same thing in the country she considered a client state, Moldova, which now falls firmly within the EU arc and has recently elected a pro-European President and Parliament. Russia tried but failed to interfere in Romanian Presidential elections, elevating an obscure and unknown pro-Russian extremist of no political party in the first round of the Romanian Presidential polls which the Constitutional Court then annulled on the basis of intelligence evidence of manifest Russian interference. This is an exceptional win for the EU’s rule of law principles. Armenia, having felt abandoned by Russia in the recent takeover of the Nagorno-Karabakh region by Azerbaijan, is now making overtures towards the European Union for closer integration, as once took place in Georgia. In other words, Russia is losing her grip on her other centres of influence due to investment of all her political and military resources into the war in Ukraine.
This will also affect Russia’s ability to operate in western Africa, where she had been successful in infiltrating a number of countries in west Africa that were former French colonies, due to their mineral reserves. These operations were run from Russia’s Syrian bases and using Syrian mercenaries to a significant degree. To the extent that those bases are now in jeopardy, so are Russia’s operations in West Africa.
Russia is financially on its knees. Its currency has collapsed again, at the time of writing the exchange rate being 110 rubles to the US dollar whereas in 2014 (before the first invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions) it was 30. Russia has to resolve this war or to increase her totalitarian tendencies to oppress an increasingly incandescent population. The terms of a likely armistice have not changed since we wrote this piece but the problem President Trump will find in imposing it is actually to stop the Ukrainians and Russians from shooting one another, both of whom are inclined to fight to the death for every last building. Insertion of Western troops into a buffer zone seems inevitable as the only way of actually stopping them.
In any event Ukraine appears to emerge as a winner from all this geopolitical chaos. Although the war may take a while to stop, after some initial bungled diplomacy, it will stop this year. Russia’s ally Iran is deeply wounded by Israel. America will always support Israel that will now turn her back on Russia after a failure to support Israel in the UN Security Council or elsewhere in her attacks upon Iran’s various proxies. Nobody will recognise the Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories. Sanctions on Russia will remain and may even tighten: something that will benefit China and India in their competition with one-another as they use the sanctions as an excuse to buy Russian hydrocarbons at cheaper prices. While there will be rising geopolitical tensions across the world over the coming years, Ukraine will fall firmly within the western orbit and that can only be good as Ukraine escapes the Russian orbit. While there are many uncertainties, things are looking up both for Ukraine as a country and for her citizens.