Looking into a Cloudy Crystal Ball at 2025

It seems we’ll enter the coming year with a full plate, as the world faces challenges from Africa to Latin America, Belarus, Myanmar, and beyond.

By Anil Madan

The major hotspots of the world that we have viewed with fearful apprehension continue to be such: the Middle East, where Israel’s attacks on Gaza continue, and the Iranians and Houthis inject varying degrees of uncertainty; Ukraine, where Russia’s ongoing war continues to obliterate its infrastructure and make life miserable; Taiwan, where China continues to threaten a blockade or worse and carries out naval and air maneuvers. We can add Syria to these.

Add to these geopolitical issues, universal concerns about the future of Europe and NATO, catastrophic weather and climate events, plastics pollution, famines, repression, human rights abuses, and disease, and it seems that we will enter 2025 with our plates full. From Africa to Latin America, to Belarus, to Myanmar, and beyond, the world is beset with problems. If Donald Trump’s second term as President generates what his detractors fear as their worst nightmares, we might see full plates heaped to overflowing.

Generating a sense of foreboding is easy, but fear is not necessarily predictive. The irony-laced apocryphal Chinese curse — “May you live in interesting times” — suggests, with its predicted overtones, that the year ahead will indeed be “interesting times”.

An earth-shaking turn in the Middle East

Events in the Middle East have certainly taken an earth-shaking turn. The fall of Bashar al-Assad, as welcome as the fall of any inhumane tyrant ever was, is much better understood as a wider collapse of the Axis of Discord and Hate championed by the twin pillars of evil, the Ayatollahs of Iran and Putin of Russia.

For a while, it appeared that Iran and Hamas, aided by Hezbollah and the Houthis, had achieved a breach in Israel’s defenses. But that all fell apart as Israel systematically decimated the leaders of both Hamas and Hezbollah, degraded and destroyed their respective destructive capabilities. The fall of Syria is widely attributed to the failure of Russia and Iran to continue their support of Assad, but this does not explain why his forces suddenly capitulated. Somehow, the Syrian opposition to Assad, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), collaborated with the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (comprising detractors from Assad’s forces) to overthrow Assad.

This, of course, has thrown Syria into turmoil. Turkiye is a major player and views the Kurdish YPG militia — the dominant player in the Syrian Democratic Forces supported by the US — as nothing more than a part of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militia. The PKK is banned in Turkiye and has been engaged in a rebellion in that countryfor 40 years. Complicating all this is the fact that the leader of HTS, Abu Mohammad al-Julani (also known as Ahmad Hussein al-Sharaa), was a member of the Islamic State group ISIS. So, we have Turkiye and Israel vying for control of parts of Syria, the US ambivalent about embracing a former ISIS leader notwithstanding his declarations that he is inclined to make Syria an inclusive and democratic state, Russia anxious to reclaim its air and naval facilities, and Iran viewing with alarm the severing of its Shia Crescent and supply routes to Hezbollah. Add to this the uncertainty of what Biden will do as he exits and Trump as he assumes the presidency, and the situation remains fluid.Read More… Become a Subscriber

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 27 December 2024